Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging.

• Author: Rubin, Edward
• Position: Book review

BEYOND THE FORMALIST-REALIST DIVIDE: THE ROLE OF POLITICS IN JUDGING. By Brian Z. Tamanaha. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2010. Pp. x, 252. Cloth, $70; paper, $24.95.

INTRODUCTION

The periodization of history, like chocolate cake, can have some bad effects on us, but it is hard to resist. We realize, of course, that Julius Caesar didn't think of himself as "Classical" and Richard the Lionhearted didn't regard the time in which he lived as the Middle Ages. Placing historical figures in subsequently defined periods separates us from them and impairs our ability to understand them on their own terms. (1) But it is difficult to understand anything about them at all if we try to envision history as continuous and undifferentiated. We need periodization to organize events that are numerous, remote, and unfamiliar, and to create stable images of cultures that are dramatically different from our own. One of the greatest services that a historian can perform is to identify and define a particular time period so that we can grasp its distinctive features. Another great service is to apply critical scrutiny to that definition in order to highlight and counteract the distortions that periodization inevitably creates.

Just as our mental topography of Western civilization is irretrievably shaped by its division into Classical Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, the High Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Early Modern Era, so our mental topography of American legal history is shaped by its division into formalism, realism, legal process, and the modern period, the last of which consists of law and economics, critical legal studies, and law and society. Legal historians have done us a great service by grouping the work of judges and scholars into these readily comprehended periods and defining the mode of thought that characterizes each one. In his new book, Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide, Brian Tamanaha (2) does us a great service by revealing that this periodization rests on serious distortions. Specifically, he demonstrates that the formalists were not formalist, that they simply did not subscribe to the mode of thought that has long been regarded as their defining feature. He goes on show that the realists were not realists, or at least not nearly as realist as subsequent observers have depicted them.

What emerges from the analytic pressure that Tamanaha applies to our inherited periodization is a counternarrative of continuity. Rather than being divided into two crisply defined movements with opposing views of judicial decision making, the first seventy years of American legal academic thought can be seen as a more complex and unified exploration of related themes. But Tamanaha is after more than historical revisionism in this provocative and thoughtful book. If the formalists were not formalist and the realists were not realists, then judicial-politics scholars--perhaps the largest group of social scientists who study judicial decision making--are off on the wrong track in taking the realist critique as their inspiration and the formalist approach as their target.

This Review will begin by summarizing Tamanaha's book, with particular emphasis on his pathbreaking analysis of the so-called realists (Part I). It will then proceed to assess the theory of judicial decision making that he proposes on the basis of this analysis (Part II). The final section of the Review goes beyond the scope of Tamanaha's book to consider another of its implications. Our traditional approach to legal education is a product of the formalist era and has been taken to reflect the formalists' conception of law. But if the formalists were not formalist, then both the character of that approach and the current demands for its reform may need to be reassessed (Part III).

The final conclusion of this Review can be briefly stated at the outset. Not everyone will agree with Tamanaha's critique of the judicial-politics literature or his jurisprudential theory of judging, needless to say, although they certainly merit serious consideration. But anyone who writes about the history of American legal scholarship without taking his analysis of formalism and realism into account must henceforth be regarded as naive and uninformed. Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide is one of those rare works that not only provides new information and advances illuminating arguments, but changes our basic understanding of the subject it addresses.

1. TAMANAHA'S CRITIQUE OF THE FORMALIST-REALIST DIVIDE

   The first period of American legal scholarship is generally taken to be the half century or so after the Civil War, when law schools developed and the full-time academics who taught in those schools began to produce a substantial body of legal scholarship. This is the period that we describe by using the term "legal formalism." Comprehensive criticisms of this scholarship were voiced virtually from its inception; the "most influential modern formulation of the story about the formalists" (p. 17) is Grant Gilmore's 1977 book, significantly titled The Ages of American Law. According to this story, formalist scholars and judges were so benighted as to believe that law is a comprehensive and autonomous system; that judges can derive their decisions by mechanistic or syllogistic logic from the general principles that it embodies; and that they therefore thought they were not making law when confronted with a case of first impression, but only using logic to find the answer that the principles necessarily prescribed.

   Tamanaha employs an interesting research strategy to assess this familiar account: he actually reads the work of the scholars who are labeled formalists. As he demonstrates through extensive citation and quotation, none of the people who were saddled with this sobriquet believed the doctrines that have been so consistently ascribed to them. Instead, they recognized that law is often open-ended or indeterminate and were fully aware that judges need to deploy judgment, experience, and background understandings to decide cases coming before them (pp. 18-19, 32-43). In one telling passage, Tamanaha quotes Gilmore's characterization of the formalists as committed to the view that "courts never legislate that the judicial function is merely to declare the law that already exists." (3) He then proceeds to cite eight law review articles, published between 1870 and 1914, whose titles include the terms "judicial legislation" or "judge-made law" and which recognize the necessity and value of this process (p. 19). He concludes with an 1894 statement from the president of the New York bar--surely a reliable representative of the legal establishment at that time--recognizing that "the courts have indulged in judicial legislation for centuries" (p. 19).

   Judicial legislation creates potential legitimacy problems, even if one ignores the deeper questions of democratic accountability, because it conflicts with stare decisis. Critics asserted that the so-called formalists avoided this quandary by means of a "mechanical jurisprudence" that claimed to apply rigidly determined decision rules, denied uncertainty, and clung slavishly to existing precedents. (4) But as Tamanaha demonstrates, lawyers and judges of the time were fully aware of the problem and adopted a variety of stances toward it, none of which involved outright denial of its existence. Some bemoaned the ability of judges to manipulate precedents in accordance with their personal predilections (pp. 32, 35), others celebrated the role of judgment as the essence of the judicial function (pp. 19-20, 34), and still others simply accepted both manipulation and judgment as inevitable features of a common law regime (pp. 19, 39). In other words, the law review writers of the so-called formalist period understood the open-ended nature of judicial decision making and were able to debate its vices and virtues in sophisticated terms.

   Going beyond direct refutation, Tamanaha thoughtfully explains how five decades of legal thought and scholarship could have been so badly mischaracterized and misinterpreted. While part of the reason is simple academic slovenliness--he demonstrates, for example, that the views Jerome Frank attributes to Henry Maine are actually the views that Maine was criticizing (pp. 14-17)--the deeper and more instructive explanation is conceptual confusion. Encapsulating one's critique of this body of scholarly writing in disparaging terms such as "formalism" (which, he notes, the formalists never used to describe themselves) (5) and "mechanical jurisprudence" obscures the range of assertions that are being made about it. Those assertions are that the formalists believed, first, that law is based on an underlying and logically ordered set of principles; second, that the content of those principles could be discerned by deductive reasoning in an unambiguous fashion; third, that judges apply those principles, once discerned, to actual cases by deductive reasoning; and fourth, that the actual state of the common law that results from those principles is unambiguously discerned and consistently applied by judges. (6)

   Tamanaha's scrupulous research reveals that the fourth position was rarely asserted during the formalist era; the "messy and uncertain" state of the law was readily and regularly acknowledged in the law review literature (p. 51). The third position was just as rare. Scholars and judges at the time understood that the messiness and uncertainty they observed in the law resulted from the "complexities involved in judging and ... the foibles of human judges" (p. 51). Some of these scholars, most famously C.C. Langdell, did advance the claim that law is a science (pp. 28-29, 52), an assertion disputed by a number of practitioners at the time (pp. 29-31). But what Langdell and his academic colleagues were asserting, at most, were the first two propositions: that...