Russian Legal Realism: A New Paradigm for Understanding Law and a Means of Overcoming the Legal Crisis? Book Review: E. N. Tonkov, Russian Legal Realism

This article is devoted to E. N. Tonkov’s monograph, “Russian Legal Realism” (series: Interpretation of the Sources of Law), the first comprehensive study in Russian of the methodology, foundations, and evolution of Russian legal realism. Russian legal realism has received recognition from the academic community on par with American, Scandinavian, French, German, and Italian legal realism. This monograph presents a legal concept from a sociological perspective, seeking to combine the advantages of modern versions of natural law and positivism and to find effective means of overcoming the obstacles to social development posed by legal formalism. It is concluded that the characterization of Russian legal realism as a socio-legal and socio-psychological phenomenon, the originality of the approaches to its study, and the relevance of the problems of regulating social relations raised in the monograph are evidence of the development of this scientific field, E. N. Tonkov’s contribution to the study of legal reality and the search for ways to bridge the gap between the dogmas of classical legal theory and legal practice.