Political scientists regularly assert that judges are deluded or deceptive about the nature of judicial decision making. This article shows, to the contrary, that for more than a century judges have candidly expressed a balanced realism about judging. Judges admit that sometimes they must make...

Law involves institutions rooted in the history of a society that evolve in relation to surrounding social, psychological, cultural, economic, political, technological, and ecological influences. Law must be understood naturalistically, historically, and holistically. In my usage, naturalism...

For several generations now, legal scholars in the United States have framed debates about law and judging in terms of formalism-versus-realism. This entrenched framework is grounded in a widely accepted historical account. In this essay, I dismantle this antithesis and reconstruct their...

Our legal tradition contains two fundamental pillars: the rule of law ideal, and an instrumental view of law. Although we take both for granted, in certain respects they are a mismatched pair. This article explores four specific points of tension between these two central streams of thought. The...

New Institutional Economics (NIE) has secured impressive achievements in academia and policy circles. The World Bank and other development organization in the past two decades have expended billions of dollars on efforts to build “good governance” and the “rule of law” informed by the...

Billions of dollars have been spent on law and development (or “rule of law”) projects around the world in the past two decades, focusing on judicial reform, legal training, constitution and code writing, legal transplantation, anti-corruption efforts, and more. In recent overviews, many...

Critics of Failing Law Schools have focused on two main points: 1) Income Based Repayment (IBR) solves the debt problem for law students, and 2) the differentiated legal education system I propose is elitist and will create a division within the legal profession. These two critiques are...

In The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi described the modern era in terms of the transformation of labor, land, and money into commodities, and the expansion of the market as the basic organizing principle of society—a transformation championed by liberal economic theory. This...