During the mid to late 19th century, post the American Civil War, the United States underwent a transition from an agrarian society to an industrial and commercial civilization, alongside the establishment of capitalist systems. From a legal perspective, the entire society advocated for the protection of private property rights and contractual freedoms. Judicially, there was an emphasis on freezing legal rules and judicial techniques to create an efficient and orderly "legal technical framework." Legal formalism, under the guise of "legal science," emerged as the predominant legal ideology in the United States, aiming to align legal rules with judicial techniques to establish a coherent and efficient legal system. However, Holmes, as a representative of legal pragmatism, keenly observed the judicial rigidity and imbalance in the emphasis on individual rights within legal formalism. He proposed an empirical perspective, asserting that the essence of law lies not solely in logic but also in experience, challenging the prevailing "legal science" paradigm.
This paper is divided into six main sections:
The introductory portion of this dissertation elucidates the genesis of Holmes' legal pragmatism, delving into its scholarly antecedents and scholarly significance, while consolidating and evaluating relevant scholarly literature from domestic and international spheres. It also provides a succinct overview of the compositional schema and logical scaffolding of this treatise.
Subsequent to this, the second section delves into Randall's embodiment of legal formalism through his elucidation of the "view of legal science," explicating the quintessential tenets of legal formalism. Advocates of legal formalism posit law as a scientific discipline, employing methodologies congruent with those of natural sciences in their legal analyses and regarding deductive logic as pivotal in the adjudicative milieu. By leveraging Gray's taxonomy of the five cardinal objectives of legal systems, the author delivers a comprehensive exposition of legal formalism's ratiocinative modus operandi, thereby laying bare its inherent shortcomings with heightened perspicacity.
The ensuing third section pivots towards an exposition of Holmes' conceptual framework anchored in "logic" and "experience," serving as the sine qua non for his legal pragmatism. It articulates Holmes' epistemological stance, accentuating the nuanced dialectic between logic and law whilst promulgating the primacy of societal interests through the prism of the "experience" theory. This comprehensive exegesis serves to illuminate Holmes' pragmatic legal philosophy with heightened lucidity.
Moving forward, the fourth section adopts a polemical stance, employing the "Experience theory" and "Case method" as cudgels in critiquing the edifice of legal formalism. The "Case method," emblematic of Randall's legal formalism, has engendered an undue emphasis on formal rationality, thus fettering judicial flexibility. Conversely, the "Experience theory" intrinsic to Holmes' legal pragmatism interrogates the premise of logic as the exclusive lifeblood of law, positing a more nuanced and socially attuned approach to mitigate judicial ossification.
The ensuing fifth section adopts a sociological vantage point, dissecting Holmes' legal pragmatism within the epistemological crucible of knowledge production, elucidating its incipient genesis from the crucible of societal exigencies, philosophical antecedents, and teleological imperatives. It scrutinizes how Holmes' legal pragmatism arose as a rejoinder to the sociopolitical and jurisprudential vicissitudes of the epoch, amalgamating pragmatic philosophical precepts with juridical applications.
Concluding this discourse, the final sixth section elucidates the dialectical vicissitudes of legal evolution oscillating between the imperatives of formal justice and the exigencies of substantive justice. It contrasts legal realism's pragmatic alternatives to conventional judicial paradigms with legal pragmatism's critique of excessive formal rationality within legal formalism, underscoring the intrinsic value of substantive justice. Ultimately, this section synthesizes and analytically distills the ontogeny of legal development, characterized by a dialectic of negation and further negation.