About the Book
From A Realist Point of View combines new essays with revised versions of the most important recent work of preeminent legal realist Brian Leiter. This collection offers a systematic and philosophically ambitious account of legal realism and links it, for the first time, to political realism. Throughout, Leiter engages with various legal traditions (American, Scandinavian, Italian, French) and realist thinkers, from Thucydides to
Nietzsche.Part I, "Realism about Law and Legal Reasoning," examines the problem of theoretical disagreement, the relation between legal positivism and realism, and the realist theory of precedent, concluding with a
penetrating critique of the recent metaphysical inflation of general jurisprudence in America. Part II, "Realism about Courts, Politics and Morality," brings the realistic perspective to bear on courts and democracy, as well as on morality (understood as a culturally variably human artifact) and moral philosophy (treated as ethnographic data, irrelevant to political practice). It concludes with case studies of two realist political thinkers, Marx and Foucault.
Table of Contents:
1. What is Realism?
Part I: Realism about Law and Legal Reasoning
2. Explaining Theoretical Disagreement
3. Theoretical Disagreements in Law: Another Look
4. Postscript on Theoretical Disagreements
5. Legal Positivism as a Realist Theory of Law
6. Realism about Precedent
7. How to Cabin the Realist Indeterminacy Thesis
8. The Demarcation Problem in Jurisprudence: A New Case for Skepticism
9. Against the Metaphysical Turn in Recent American Jurisprudence
Part II: Realism about Courts, Politics, and Morality
10. Legal Formalism and Legal Realism: What is the Issue?
11. In Praise of Realism (and Against "Nonsense" Jurisprudence)
12. Constitutional Law, Moral Judgment, and the U.S. Supreme Court as Super-Legislature
13. The Roles of Judges in Democracies: A Realistic View
14. The Boundaries of the Moral (and Legal) Community
15. Disagreement, Anti-Realism about Reasons, and Inference to the Best Explanation
16. Normativity for Naturalists
17. The Paradoxes of Public Philosophy
18. Why Marxism Still Does Not Need Normative Theory: A Polemic
19. Foucault as a Kind of Realist: Genealogical Critique and the Debunking of Human Sciences
About the Author :
Brian Leiter is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago. He has been a visiting professor of law or philosophy at Oxford, Yale, and the Universities of Paris X and Rome III, among others. He is the author of Naturalizing Jurisprudence (OUP, 2007), Moral Psychology with Nietzsche (OUP, 2019), and (with J. Edwards) Marx (Routledge,
2025). He is also editor of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law.
Review :
[A] very good book, indeed and... a significant milestone in contemporary general jurisprudence.
Brian Leiter stands today as both the foremost exponent of the American realist tradition and the preeminent scholar of legal realism in its broader theoretical landscape. This volume constitutes not merely a defence of realism, but an erudite and systematically reasoned vindication of its core claims-crafted in such a way as to challenge and potentially persuade even those jurists and legal theorists who have long remained outside the realist paradigm. By situating realism in critical and sustained engagement with the canonical figures of modern jurisprudence-from Kelsen to Ross, to Hart, to Dworkin-it succeeds in securing for the realist project a more rigorous, durable, and philosophically coherent foundation. A great book!
In this outstanding collection, Leiter widens and deepens his naturalistic approach to problems in law, politics, and morality. He insistently asks: How do things here really work? His answers are always illuminating and, at times, uncomfortable. With analytic precision and forensic insight, Leiter hauls us before the bar of realism, shreds our moralizing defences, and sends us down to the hard labour of 'discursive hygiene'. Read these essays and see if you remain confident of your innocence. I doubt it. A terrific book.
Written by the most sophisticated living legal realist, From a Realist Point of View provides a deeply compelling reinterpretation of realist thought... Leiter is also an eminent legal philosopher and the signal contribution of this book lies in its articulation and defense of a philosophically robust vision of realist thought that is Leiter's own, interlaced with incisive treatment of core questions in general jurisprudence, moral philosophy, and political theory.
A masterful, wide-ranging, and original book. It combines jurisprudence, political theory, metaethics, and the history of philosophy with rare clarity, and dissolves the moralising myths and pieties that cloud those disciplines. Brian Leiter's unique achievement is to show, with force and care, how philosophical naturalism, legal realism, and political realism belong together, and why that matters to understand how law and politics work in the real world. Incisive, fearless, and indispensable
The book is a brilliant synthesis, recapitulation, and further advancement of the ideas that Leiter has been defending in his last 15 years of intense philosophical work... Leiter's book is well-argued, always sustained by a detailed, inventive and thought-provoking analysis, and it will no doubt encourage new patterns of inquiry in legal and moral philosophy. Anyone interested in contemporary legal theory will benefit from this book's careful review of many important jurisprudential topics, and from its subtle arguments advancing the author's own philosophical proposal.
This collection of essays showcases Brian Leiter at the top of his game... With characteristic rigor, clarity, and wit, Leiter deconstructs moralistic fantasies and elaborates considerably on the research programme first defended in Naturalizing Jurisprudence. Along the way, legal realism receives its most sophisticated philosophical defense to date.
