Legal realism is a school of legal philosophy that is generally associated with the culmination of the early-twentieth century attack on the orthodox claims of late-nineteenth-century classical legal thought in the United States (American legal realism). American Legal Realism is often remembered for its challenge to the Classical legal claim that orthodox legal institutions provided an autonomous and self-executing system of legal discourse untainted by politics. Unlike Classical legal thought, American Legal Realism worked vigorously to depict the institution of law without denying or distorting a picture of sharp moral, political, and social conflict. The most important legacy of American Legal Realism is its challenge to the Classical legal claim that legal reasoning was separate and autonomous from moral and political discourse.

Although the American Legal Realist movement is conventionally thought to have been confined to the period between the two world wars, many of the ideas that figured prominently in the Realists’ teachings and writings were first developed by dissidents among the preceding generation of scholars.

Morton J. Horwitz (born 1938) is an American legal historian and law professor at Harvard Law School. The recent past dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan, relates that during her time at law school, students often nicknamed him as "Mort the Tort" since he taught the first-year subject Torts.

Horwitz obtained an A.B. from the City College of New York (1959), an A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1962 and 1964), and an LL.B. from Harvard Law School (1967).

He became an Associate Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 1970 and gained tenure as a full professor in 1974. In 1981, he was appointed the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History.

His first book, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860, was published in 1977, and is widely regarded as one of the most important books in modern American legal historiography. It won the Bancroft Prize, the preeminent prize in American history in the United States. A product of its time, this book sought to give a "thick description" (à la Clifford Geertz) of the transformation of American law in the period, without appealing to "covering laws" (à la Carl Gustav Hempel). The book was conceived as an attack on the so-called "Consensus School" of American Legal History, which had dominated the field of Legal History in the 1950s and minimized the role of class dimensions in American legal history. The main argument of his book is that in the first half of the 19th century, many judges self-consciously allied themselves with a rapidly-growing class of mercantile capitalists and promoted a series of legal rules which favored those capitalists.

Costas Douzinas is Professor of Law and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. He is well known for his work in Human Rights, Aesthetics, Postmodern Legal Theory and Political Philosophy. He was deeply involved in the British Critical Legal Studies Movement from the outset and was part of the team which set up the Birkbeck School of Law.

Adieu, Derrida (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Routledge Cavendish, 2007)
Critical Jurisprudence (with Adam Gearey) (Hart, 2005)
The End of Human Rights (Hart, 2000)
Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. (with Lynn Nead) (University of Chicago Press, 1999)
Justice Miscarried: Ethics and Aesthetics in Law (with Ronnie Warrington) (Prentice-Hall, 1995)
Politics, Postmodernity and Critical Legal Studies: The Legality of the Contingent (Routledge, 1994)