The economic analysis of law and North American legal realism

Abstract

The following work focuses on the development of Western legal proceedings initiated in a non-professional fashion in Athens and then professionalized in Rome, with a form of jurisdiction limited to the simple declaration of the law. Mainly as a result of canonical law, the Medieval period witnessed a formalization and bureaucratization of the courts, with the model adopted in a more general sense in Continental Europe. In opting for a unique system for the administration of justice known as common law, however, England distanced itself from the inquisitorial model of canonical law, using the adversarial model as a basis. Following the steps taken by the English metropole, the United States culturally and legally adopted common law and the jury, adapting the English system to the characteristics of its own nation. The development of this model in the US would come to be marked at the beginning of the twentieth century by the emergence of the movement of North American legal realism, as a deconstruction of classic legal thought, with its decline and resurgence in realist reconstructivism evidenced in the critical theory known as the Economic Analysis of Law.