Legal realism is a legal philosophy that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, mainly in the United States and Scandinavia. It challenges traditional legal thinking by focusing on the actual behaviour of judges rather than abstract legal norms. Proponents such as Karl N. Llewellyn and Jerome Frank argue that the law[2] is essentially what judges decide in practice, not what legal texts prescribe. The movement seeks to understand judicial decision-making through empirical analysis, seeing law as a set of predictions about future court judgements. The Scandinavian legal realists, led by Axel Hägerström, similarly aimed to expose legal fictions and understand how legal systems actually operate. Although criticised for potentially granting judges too much discretion, legal realism has significantly influenced legal scholarship by emphasising the practical and behavioural aspects of law, distinguishing itself from both the legal positivism[1] and legal moralism by prioritising judicial action over theoretical constructs.
Legal realism (legal realism) is a set of doctrinal currents in the philosophy of law that understand the legal system as a fact, distancing itself from the metaphysics and more idealists on the law. In general, its theorists tend to see the judicial decision (which would be an act of political will) as the true way of determining the law. Its main versions have developed in the United States and Scandinavian countries with different theoretical formulations, but they have also gained ground in other countries.
When it is said that realism deals with facts, that the object for realists is the fact, it does not refer to the everyday fact, nor the social fact. The fact that will be the reference for realism is the court decisionFor this group of doctrinal currents, the law is what the courts do and not what they are expected to do or what the sources of law indicate they should do.
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