The Legal Realists on Political Economy

Alongside the well-known jurisprudential ideas associated with legal realism, some scholars have highlighted the realists’ political-economic ideas. Best known among them has been Morton Horwitz, who has argued that the realists launched an “attack on the legitimacy of the market.” Other scholars challenged this view and argued that there was no significant connection between legal realism and political economic ideas. I offer a corrective to both views. I first consider the work of five legal realists (Karl Llewellyn, Adolf Berle, William O. Douglas, Jerome Frank, and Thurman Arnold) and show that all held views that were well within the political-economic mainstream of their era, which did not challenge the legitimacy of market capitalism but wanted to see markets better regulated. I also show that for many of these realists, there were important connections between their jurisprudential and political-economic ideas. I then turn to some neglected writings of Felix Cohen to show that he too saw a direct link between his legal and economic ideas. However, unlike the other legal realists discussed here, he was a radical critic of market capitalism. I use his political-economic writings for a reconsideration of his better-known jurisprudential works.