Karl Nickerson Llewellyn was one the most famous professors of law in the decades following 1930 , because of his short book The Bramble Bush(1930) which generations of law students read as their introduction to law. Educated in boyhood in a German teacher's family, he possessed the deep emotion and the poetic insight with not a shred of sympathy for the Prussian autocrat . In Yale College he was a linguist and a scholar, especially interested in the work of Sumner and Keller in the science of society. Llewellyn was also known as a leading realist, one of a number of critics of law of his generation who were sceptical about the proposition that U.S law operated as an objective system of rules . Rules according to Llewellyn and to his friend…show more content… Karl Llewellyn’s theory:
Realism is the anti-thesis of idealism , Realist are interested in sociological and other factors that influence law and don’t give importance to laws enacted by legislature and uphold only judge ,made laws as genuine laws. According to Llewellyn realism means a movement in thought and work about law . As a realist, Llewellyn advocated a focus upon what judges actually do in disputes and what influences them to do what they do. A pre-existing law may influence a judge.
Karl Llewellyn outlined the principle features of realist approach , which are as follows:
1) There has to be a conception of law in flux and of the judicial creation of law
2) Society changes faster than law , so there is a constant need to improve law.
3) There has to be a temporary separation between is and ought for the purpose of study.
Llewellyn described that law is an institution which is necessary in society and which is comprised not only of rules but also contains an ideology and a body of pervasive and powerful ideals which are largely unspoken, largely implicit and which pass unmentioned in the books. Llewellyn also began by assuming that the law is under determinative of…show more content… Llewellyn's primary concern in law he considered law as a social science, a science of observation between the behaviour of law-officials and behaviour of laymen and rules are stated in the course of deciding law in current cases. But the existence of this interpretative space or gap should not.
Llewellyn’s argument, lead us to conclude that adjudication is radically arbitrary in the way that some of the more iconoclastic realists like Jerome Frank suggested. Llewellyn stated that the process of adjudication is constrained, by all sorts of conventional understandings, by local traditions, rigor, and professionalism-which the in turn negative side of realism.
Llewellyn thus stated that, all we can reasonably demand of a humane discipline it to follow the law which is constructed on the discretion of the judges . This provided a basis both for prediction and for normative criticism, for assessing the quality of the work that judges do and for saying something intelligible about how judges are likely to decide cases in the future. Karl Llewellyn approached law in a positive spirit and demonstrated the futility of theoretical concepts of justice and natural law , Llewellyn’s works and efforts tried to rationalise