Important Study of the Legal Realism Movement The history of the concept of legal realism as it evolved at Yale University Law School is in fact a history of the development of legal education in this country during the years 1927-1960, as Kalman shows in this important study. The realists' attention toward the importance of the role of litigation, the practitioner, judges and judicial reasoning, and the judiciary in a societal context represented a departure from the scientific casebook method espoused by C.C. Langdell at Harvard University Law School in the 1870s, and later supported by Roscoe Pound. Laura Kalman is a Professor of History at University of California Santa Barbara. Laura Kalman argues that factors such as budgetary constraints, university politics, personal feuds, and broader social trends may have been as important as legal theory in shaping the contours and determining the fate of legal realism at Yale. She calls her book 'a case study of the interrelationship between intellectual theory and institutional factors within the specific context of legal education.' Using legal education at Harvard as a reference point, especially Langdellian conceptualism, she sees realism as a variety of functionalism, reflecting a belief that law should be organized with reference to facts and social purposes rather than abstract legal concepts. Thus, the emergence of legal realism at Yale was, among other things, an attempt by the Yale Law School to differentiate itself from the Harvard Law School and thereby to enhance its own stature. --Paul L. Murphy, The American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Oct. 1989) Laura Kalman's monograph, originally a dissertation, is nevertheless a fresh and rather engaging study of a finished chapter in intellectual history-the legal realist movement. It flourished in the 1930s, revived in another form after World War II, and then faded away around 1960, when Kalman ends her work. --Ralph S. Brown, Law and History Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1988) CONTENTS Acknowledgments Prologue 1 The Context and Characteristics of Legal Realism 2 Realism Rejected: The Case of Harvard 3 Two Realistic Law Schools? Columbia and Yale 4 Pictures from an Institution: The First Yale Realists 5 Postwar Realism 6 Convergence Epilogue Notes Index

A comprehensive, engaging, and revisionist account of the Court fight that ties it to contemporary policy debates. In the last past few years, liberals concerned about the prospect of long-term conservative dominance of the federal courts have revived an idea that famously crashed and burned in the 1930s: court packing. Not surprisingly, today's court packing advocates have run into a wall of opposition, with most citing the 1930s episode as one FDR's greatest failures. In early 1937, Roosevelt-fresh off a landslide victory-stunned the country when he proposed a plan to expand the size of the court by up to six justices. Today, that scheme is generally seen as an act of hubris-an instance where FDR failed to read Congress and the public properly. In FDR's Gambit, the eminent legal historian Laura Kalman challenges the conventional wisdom by telling the story as it unfolded, without the distortions of hindsight. Indeed, while scholars have portrayed the Court Bill as the ill-fated brainchild of a hubristic President made overbold by victory, Kalman argues to the contrary that acumen, not arrogance, accounted for Roosevelt's actions. Far from erring tragically from the beginning, FDR came very close to getting additional justices, and the Court itself changed course. As Kalman shows, the episode suggests that proposing a change in the Court might give the justices reason to consider whether their present course is endangering the institution and its vital role in a liberal democracy. Based on extensive archival research, FDR's Gambit offers a novel perspective on the long-term effects of court packing's failure, as a legacy that remains with us today. Whether or not it is the right remedy for today's troubles, Kalman argues that court packing does not deserve to be recalled as one fated for failure in 1937.

The Warren Court of the 1950s and 1960s was the most liberal in American history. Yet within a few short years, new appointments redirected the Court in a more conservative direction, a trend that continued for decades. However, even after Warren retired and the makeup of the court changed, his Court cast a shadow that extends to our own era. In The Long Reach of the Sixties, Laura Kalman focuses on the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Presidents Johnson and Nixon attempted to dominate the Court and alter its course. Using newly released-and consistently entertaining-recordings of Lyndon Johnson's and Richard Nixon's telephone conversations, she roots their efforts to mold the Court in their desire to protect their Presidencies. The fierce ideological battles-between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches-that ensued transformed the meaning of the Warren Court in American memory. Despite the fact that the Court's decisions generally reflected public opinion, the surrounding debate calcified the image of the Warren Court as activist and liberal. Abe Fortas's embarrassing fall and Nixon's campaign against liberal justices helped make the term "activist Warren Court" totemic for liberals and conservatives alike. The fear of a liberal court has changed the appointment process forever, Kalman argues. Drawing from sources in the Ford, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton presidential libraries, as well as the justices' papers, she shows how the desire to avoid another Warren Court has politicized appointments by an order of magnitude. Among other things, presidents now almost never nominate politicians as Supreme Court justices (another response to Warren, who had been the governor of California). Sophisticated, lively, and attuned to the ironies of history, The Long Reach of the Sixties is essential reading for all students of the modern Court and U.S. political history.

The Warren Court of the 1950s and 1960s was the most liberal in American history. Yet within a few short years, new appointments redirected the Court in a more conservative direction, a trend that continued for decades. However, even after Warren retired and the makeup of the court changed, his Court cast a shadow that extends to our own era. In The Long Reach of the Sixties, Laura Kalman focuses on the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Presidents Johnson and Nixon attempted to dominate the Court and alter its course. Using newly released-and consistently entertaining-recordings of Lyndon Johnson's and Richard Nixon's telephone conversations, she roots their efforts to mold the Court in their desire to protect their Presidencies. The fierce ideological battles-between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches-that ensued transformed the meaning of the Warren Court in American memory. Despite the fact that the Court's decisions generally reflected public opinion, the surrounding debate calcified the image of the Warren Court as activist and liberal. Abe Fortas's embarrassing fall and Nixon's campaign against liberal justices helped make the term "activist Warren Court" totemic for liberals and conservatives alike. The fear of a liberal court has changed the appointment process forever, Kalman argues. Drawing from sources in the Ford, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton presidential libraries, as well as the justices' papers, she shows how the desire to avoid another Warren Court has politicized appointments by an order of magnitude. Among other things, presidents now almost never nominate politicians as Supreme Court justices (another response to Warren, who had been the governor of California). Sophisticated, lively, and attuned to the ironies of history, The Long Reach of the Sixties is essential reading for all students of the modern Court and U.S. political history.

The development of the modern Yale Law School is deeply intertwined with the story of a group of students in the 1960s who worked to unlock democratic visions of law and social change that they associated with Yale's past and with the social climate in which they lived. During a charged moment in the history of the United States, activists challenged senior professors, and the resulting clash pitted young against old in a very human story. By demanding changes in admissions, curriculum, grading, and law practice, Laura Kalman argues, these students transformed Yale Law School and the future of American legal education. Inspired by Yale's legal realists of the 1930s, Yale law students between 1967 and 1970 spawned a movement that celebrated participatory democracy, black power, feminism, and the counterculture. After these students left, the repercussions hobbled the school for years. Senior law professors decided against retaining six junior scholars who had witnessed their conflict with the students in the early 1970s, shifted the school's academic focus from sociology to economics, and steered clear of critical legal studies. Ironically, explains Kalman, students of the 1960s helped to create a culture of timidity until an imaginative dean in the 1980s tapped into and domesticated the spirit of the sixties, helping to make Yale's current celebrity possible.

Important Study of the Legal Realism Movement The history of the concept of legal realism as it evolved at Yale University Law School is in fact a history of the development of legal education in this country during the years 1927-1960, as Kalman shows in this important study. The realists' attention toward the importance of the role of litigation, the practitioner, judges and judicial reasoning, and the judiciary in a societal context represented a departure from the scientific casebook method espoused by C.C. Langdell at Harvard University Law School in the 1870s, and later supported by Roscoe Pound. Laura Kalman is a Professor of History at University of California Santa Barbara. Laura Kalman argues that factors such as budgetary constraints, university politics, personal feuds, and broader social trends may have been as important as legal theory in shaping the contours and determining the fate of legal realism at Yale. She calls her book 'a case study of the interrelationship between intellectual theory and institutional factors within the specific context of legal education.' Using legal education at Harvard as a reference point, especially Langdellian conceptualism, she sees realism as a variety of functionalism, reflecting a belief that law should be organized with reference to facts and social purposes rather than abstract legal concepts. Thus, the emergence of legal realism at Yale was, among other things, an attempt by the Yale Law School to differentiate itself from the Harvard Law School and thereby to enhance its own stature. -- Paul L. Murphy, The American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Oct. 1989) Laura Kalman's monograph, originally a dissertation, is nevertheless a fresh and rather engaging study of a finished chapter in intellectual history-the legal realist movement. It flourished in the 1930s, revived in another form after World War II, and then faded away around 1960, when Kalman ends her work. -- Ralph S. Brown, Law and History Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring, 1988) CONTENTS Acknowledgments Prologue 1 The Context and Characteristics of Legal Realism 2 Realism Rejected: The Case of Harvard 3 Two Realistic Law Schools? Columbia and Yale 4 Pictures from an Institution: The First Yale Realists 5 Postwar Realism 6 Convergence Epilogue Notes Index

For more than one hundred years, Harvard's use of the case method of appellate opinions dominated legal education. Deploring the attempt to reduce law to an autonomous system of rules and principles, the realists at Yale developed a functional approach to the discipline--one that stressed the factual context of the case rather than the legal principles it raised, one that attempted to address issues of social policy by integrating law with the social sciences.
Originally published 1986.
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On the face of it, the Ford-Carter years seem completely forgettable. They were years of weak presidential leadership and national drift. Yet, as Laura Kalman shows in this absorbing narrative history, the contours of our contemporary politics took shape during these years. This was the incubation period for a powerful movement on the right that was to triumph with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. These years also marked the coming of age of the social movements of the 1960s, as their causes moved from the streets to the courts for mediation. Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action and the scope of privacy rights had immense social and political impact. The nation experienced an energy crisis, a sharp economic downturn, and a collision with fundamentalism in Iran that set the terms for coming crises. Kalman’s navigation of this eventful political and social terrain is expert and riveting.

Legal scholarship is in a state of crisis, Laura Kalman argues in this history of the most prestigious field in law studies: constitutional theory. Since the time of the New Deal, says Kalman, most law scholars have identified themselves as liberals who believe in the power of the Supreme Court to effect progressive social change. In recent years, however, new political and interdisciplinary perspectives have undermined the tenets of legal liberalism, and liberal law professors have enlisted other disciplines in the attempt to legitimize their beliefs. Such prominent legal thinkers as Cass Sunstein, Bruce Ackerman, and Frank Michelman have incorporated the work of historians into their legal theories and arguments, turning to eighteenth-century republicanism-which stressed communal values and an active citizenry-to justify their goals. Kalman, a historian and a lawyer, suggests that reliance on history in legal thinking makes sense at a time when the Supreme Court repeatedly declares that it will protect only those liberties rooted in history and tradition. There are pitfalls in interdisciplinary argumentation, she cautions, for historians' reactions to this use of their work have been unenthusiastic and even hostile. Yet lawyers, law professors, and historians have cooperated in some recent Supreme Court cases, and Kalman concludes with a practical examination of the ways they can work together more effectively as social activists.