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19th and 20th centuries

Karl Llewellyn

1893–1962 · United States · Jurist and professor; principal drafter of the Uniform Commercial Code

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Read this first. These are short summaries of large lives and bodies of work, chosen to give a first map of legal thought, not a ranking. Dates are the standard ones, with 'c.' or 'active' where they are uncertain. We paraphrase and never quote, and each summary simplifies. Read the original works before you cite anyone. This is general information, not legal advice.

1800 BCAD 2000

Life and ideas

Karl Llewellyn was an American law professor at Yale, Columbia and Chicago and the liveliest of the legal realists. His The Bramble Bush (1930), based on lectures to first-year students, tells them that what officials do about disputes is the law itself. He insisted that rules do not decide cases by themselves: judges are guided by their sense of the situation, by the habits of their craft and by the needs of the business or community involved. With the anthropologist E. Adamson Hoebel, he studied the law of the Cheyenne in The Cheyenne Way (1941). He was the chief drafter of the Uniform Commercial Code, which governs sales and other commercial dealings in almost every American state and is based on the practices of merchants.

The big idea

Rules are only part of what decides cases: judges are guided by 'situation sense', habit and the demands of the trade. Law should be studied by what officials do.

Main work

The Bramble Bush (1930); The Common Law Tradition (1960)

Legacy

A leading legal realist and the author of much of American commercial law.

The school of thought

  • American Legal Realism: Law is what courts actually do; judges are people, and their reasons are not only the rules.
← Earlier: Hans KelsenLater: Lon L. Fuller →

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