Judicial Attitudes and Voting Behavior: the 1961 Term of the United States

Lawyers, political scientists, and other social scientists share an interest in seeking to understand how complex social relationships and patterns of human interaction can be studied so as to increase our stockpile of social knowledge about law and the policy-making processes through which it is formulated. They are not agreed, however, as to how this goal best may be realized. Recollection of the major emphases of legal realism may be instructive in providing perspective for dispassionate appraisal of contemporary proposals on behalf of a science of judicial behavior. For Holmes, realism was a temper, the mood of pragmatism;' while for Llewellyn, realism was only a method, and the "method" was to get at the real facts and issues that underlie legal controversies and the procedures employed to resolve them.2 For Cardozo, realism meant to understand the values of the judge, since the judge's personality was the only funnel through which policy norms could enter into judicial decisionsY Frank, who was more influenced by Freudian psychology, shifted the focus to the sets of unique life experiences of judges which shaped their individual value-patterns;4 Felix Cohen offered the complementary view that the decisions of individual judges, whatever might be the forces that shaped their individual value-patterns, acquired social significance only when evaluated in the context of complex antecedent and consequent processes involving the interaction of many humans besides the judge. There were, of course, other well-known legal realists; but our present sample exemplifies the major emphases which realism brought to the study of American law: