A Study On The New Legal Realism

The New Legal Realism(NLR) is a new movement of law study, which rises in America and has spread to Europe. It claims that researchers should study how law function in the real world empirically with the help of social science. Up to now, there has been great quantity of researchers from legal and social science participating in this movement, who has studied on the judicial decision-making, the legal professions, the discrimination, the global law and so on. The paradigm it advocates has great important influence both in the legal studies and the legal practice; however, legal researchers in China haven't paid much attention to this flourishing movement. For this reason, this paper studies the new legal realism in the several following aspects to make a supplement.Firstly, this paper briefly describes the history of NLR, following which this paper examines the academic and social background. I point out that, the rise of NLR thanks to the outstanding contribution of the Old Legal Realism, the Sociological Jurisprudence, and the “Law and Society” movement, and is closely related to a variety of new social problems that exist at present.Thereafter, the paper outlines the core propositions of NLR in two aspects——the scope and methods of NLR. I summarize the research scope of NLR into four dimensions, that are go beyond the “law in action” and into the studying of “living law”, go beyond the countryside and into the international research, research other legal issues related to the operation of law, and the adhesion to the “legal optimism”, while summarize its research methods into three dimensions——the “bottom-to-top” research method, the interdisciplinary research method and the empirical research method. Subsequently, this paper, from the perspective of the methodology, divides NLR into two categories, that are the scientism approach and the empiricism approach. Thereafter, the paper distinguishes the NLR with the old legal realism, the “Law and Society” research movement, and the Empirical Legal Studies movement.After the above basic works, this paper focuses on the NLR's studies in several areas. These studies include the new legal realists' studies on judicial decision-making with the help of political science and quantitative analysis, the studies on the legal professions by using the new system theoretical, the studies on discrimination, especially the racial discrimination in the legal profession with the help of social psychology, anthropology, and sociology.Finally, this paper pointed out several problems the NLR must handle.