The association between this American Legal Realism and the New Deal is close indeed,57 and American lawyers often express considerable pride in their realist tradition, “the most important indigenous jurisprudential movement in the United States,” as Brian Leiter writes, “during the twentieth century.”58 Meanwhile the economic programs of the early New Deal were undertaken in a closely related pragmatic spirit. As Franklin Roosevelt described the American mood in a famous 1932 speech, “the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.
