Between Naturalism and Legal Interpretation: Modern Debates on the Nature of Legal Realism

The relevance of the topic of this paper is due to the insufficient study of the problems of the legal realism in the modern philosophy of law. The problem of substantiating the thesis of the social grounds of the court practice on the basis of rational argumentation of scientists and legal realists arguments considered in the paper. The subject of the research is to analyze the methods of legal argumentation in the works of representatives of the legal realism. The purpose of the work is to theoretically reconstruct the essence of the debate on the nature of legal realism in the field of legal epistemology naturalization. The novelty of the topic is due to the lack of studies in the educational and scientific literature on the specifics of the argumentation of legal realism, set out in the scientific works of Brian Leiter, the need to rethink traditional ideas about the theory of legal realism. The research methods used in the paper is the methods characteristic of analytical jurisprudence, including those related to the use of methods of logical and linguistic analysis, as well as special legal methods (formal legal method of interpretation of regulatory prescriptions). The main conclusions of the paper are to reveal the key arguments of the legal realism conception. It is proved that from the point of view of this concept, the law has social grounds, and judges in some cases use sociological reasoning when making court decisions.