American legal realists believe that the law is not able to be objective or achieve the ‘right answers’. American legal realists argue that there are two aspects where it can be proven that the law cannot yield the right answers. They are sceptical about conceptual rules and empirical rules and state that both are not objective. Firstly, they make a conceptual claim about law, arguing that the law is not found in the statute books but rather in the decisions of the courts. ‘Conceptual rule-scepticism’ finds that absolute authority will reside with the courts and not with the legislator, as the court pronounces the law and gets the final say. It is because of this that realists believe the law is not objective, as the judiciary is open to …show more content…
As briefly mentioned above, realists believe judges respond to the facts of cases through their non-legal influences such as personality, background, professional training or what is in the interest of the public or economy. There can be no distinction between legal or political reasoning and therefore judges are inherently biased and use the law as ‘window dressing’ to make it appear that the legal rules were the only deciding factor. According to realists, similar judicial outcomes are not purposely decided due to the law, but instead due to the same social factors operating on judges. Judges decisions are therefore not objective and cannot find the right answers, as they use non-legal influencing factors instead of the law. Dworkin disagrees with this stance, arguing that there is always a right legal answer and this is due to the moral principles which underlie the law. This would suggest that even if non-legal factors contributed in some way, the moral principles of the law would prevail and therefore find a ‘right answer’. Schauer concurs, holding a similar opinion to Hart and Dworkin. He believes realists overemphasise one aspect of the law, in this case judicial-decision making, into something exaggerated. Schauer believes that the realist approach to judicial decision making can be true in some circumstances such as in extremely ideological cases, but on the whole, non-legal factors do not have a significant impact on the majority of