Skepticism in law
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Skepticism in law is a school of jurisprudence that was a reaction against the idea of natural law, and a response to the 'formalism' of legal positivists. Legal skepticism is sometimes known as legal realism.[4]
This article may need to be rewritten to comply with Wikipedia's quality standards. (February 2011) |
According to Richard Posner, "The skeptical vein in American thinking about law runs from Holmes to the legal realists to the critical legal studies movement, while behind Holmes stretches a European skeptical legal tradition that runs from Thrasymachus (in Plato's Republic) to Hobbes and Bentham and beyond".[5]
...men make their own laws; that these laws do not flow from some mysterious omnipresence in the sky, and that judges are not independent mouthpieces of the infinite.The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes