“Law is what Court do”
Legal realism is characterized as a type of jurisprudence by its emphasis on the law as it currently appears in reality, rather than it actually is
John Chipman Gray and Oliver Wendall Holmes served as inspiration for the legal realist movement, which peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. The realists rejected the positivists’ and naturalists’ conceptual framework in favour of an empirical investigation that aimed to reveal how actual judges actually resolve cases (see Leiter 1998). The idea that judicial legislation is uncommon, which was gaining ground, severely troubled the realists. The realists held that judges create new law through the exercise of lawmaking discretion a lot more frequently than is generally believed, but not totally rejecting the idea that judges can be restricted by norms.
They contend that, contrary to positivism and naturalism, political and moral intuitions about the facts of the case are significantly more commonly used by judges to inform their decisions than are legal standards.
