The pragmatic movement gave legal realism such intellectual shape and content as it had. Then pragmatism died (or merged into other philosophical movements and lost its separate identity), and legal realism died (or was similarly absorbed and transcended). Lately pragmatism has revived, and the question I address in this Article is whether this revival has produced or is likely to produce a new jurisprudence that will bear the same relation to the new pragmatism as legal realism bore to the old. My answer is no on both counts.

QUESTION: Posner's argument here is intriguing — why would a revived pragmatism fail to generate a jurisprudence analogous to legal realism? This warrants following the reasoning. XREF: This connects to the relationship between intellectual movements and their institutional/disciplinary offspring in American legal thought.

Richard A. Posner, Richard A. Posner - What Ha…, loc. 6