Soru

In analyzing the reception of philosophical pragmatism in early twentieth-century legal realism, contemporary legal historians often isolate the pragmatist dismissal of formal logic as the primary catalyst for the realist movement's skepticism toward judicial deduction. This standard account, however, obscures a more profound methodological debt. While it is true that leading realists echoed the pragmatist disdain for treating legal concepts as immutable axioms, their most radical departure from classical formalism relied on the pragmatist theory of meaning. For pragmatists like Peirce and Dewey, the meaning of any concept is synonymous with its practical consequences. When realists applied this maxim to legal rights, asserting that a 'right' is nothing more than a prediction of how a court will act, they were not merely challenging the application of legal rules; they were obliterating the metaphysical status of the rules themselves. If a rule's existence is entirely tethered to its enforcement, then unadjudicated legal norms—those existing purely in statute but consistently ignored by judges—are rendered conceptually hollow. This ontological shift, far more than a simple aversion to syllogistic reasoning, enabled the realists to reconceptualize the judge not as a discoverer of pre-existing law, but as the active architect of legal reality.

Based on the passage, which of the following statements about a formally enacted statute that courts have consistently refused to enforce would most likely be endorsed by an early twentieth-century legal realist?