| Karl Llewellyn |
Article Index for Karl |
Website Links For Karl |
Information AboutKarl Llewellyn |
|
Karl Llewellyn (1893-1962) was a prominent American jurisprudential scholar associated with the school of Legal Realism . He was born in Seattle but grew up in Brooklyn. He attended Yale College and Yale Law School where he served as editor of the Yale Law Journal, and was a protege of the great contracts scholar, Arthur Linton Corbin . He joined the faculty at Columbia Law School in 1925, where he remained until 1951, when he joined the faculty of the University Of Chicago Law School . While at Columbia, Llewellyn became one of the major legal scholars of his day, and was a major figure in the debate over Legal Realism . He also served as principal drafter of the Uniform Commercial Code . Llewellyn and the legal realists put significantly more emphasis on the facts of a specific case than on general legal rules. Law, the realists contended, is not a deductive science. He is famous for his statement that (referring to judges, sheriffs, clerks, jailers and lawyers), ‘ {Link without Title} hat these officials do about disputes is, to my mind, the law itself.’(The Bramble Bush, pg 3). While this predictive approach to defining law of the law was criticised as incomplete by H.L.A. Hart in his book 'The Concept of Law', it has had a significant impact on jurisprudence generally. Llewellyn published a number of books, among them the postumously-published ''The Case Law System in America'' (1989), and ''Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and Practice'' (1962); ''The Common Law Tradition-Deciding Appeals'' (1960); ''The Cheyenne Way'' (with E. Adamson Hoebel) (1941), and ''The Bramble Bush'' (1930), which was written especially for first-year law students. REFERENCES Twining, William, "Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement" (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1973). Liebman, George W., "The Common Law Tradition: A Collective Portrait of Five Legal Scholars" (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers 2005). |
|
|