The Path of Law

Morality, Compensation, and the Contractual Obligation

“…The majority of subjects consistently selected “not immoral” in all different types of contingencies in which the promisor decided to breach but compensated the promisee for loss of expectancy. This result serves as evidence that most people perceive the moral value of breach of contract in a manner that is compatible with the Holmesian theory of the contractual obligation (Holmes :299, :462; Posner ; Markovits & Schwarz ).…”

American Legal Realism

“…Contra Hart, and possibly even contra Llewellyn's own earlier statements, Realism is not simply an account of judicial decision in hard cases. If, as Oliver Wendell Holmes (1897) and his Realist successors insisted, the content of the law consists at least in part, and from some standpoints (Twining 1997), as a prediction of what judges are going to do and if accurate prediction must be based on real and not paper rules, then the distinction between real and paper rules is not a challenge to governance by rules, but is instead a challenge to the belief that the content of the rules is largely located in the more or less literal meaning of authoritative legal texts. This challenge is not only one that Hart ignores but is also one that is every much as fundamental as the Realists themselves claimed.…”

El modelo darwinista del derecho: una interpretación organicista del primer Roscoe Pound

“…Holmes se une a esta idea probabilística y afirma que el Derecho consiste en las profecías de lo que los jueces harán en realidad. Cualquier cosa que ayude a la predicción será una fuente y el Derecho es la propia predicción acertada (Holmes Jr., 1897;citado en Herget, 1990, p. 39). Jabez Fox, siguiendo a los dos últimos, declara que no se puede abandonar la noción de Derecho como mandato de la soberanía, solo para caer en estándares sociales externos que cumplen el papel de un poder invisible.…”