Legal realism failed for lack of methodological tools, not for lack of aims.

Evidence

The realists knew what to do-think things not words, trace the actual consequences of legal doctrines, balance competing policies-but they didn’t have a clue as to how to do any of these things. It was not their fault. The tools of economics, statistics, and other pertinent sciences were insufficiently developed to enable a social-engineering approach to be taken to law. — Richard A. Posner, What Has Pragmatism to Offer Law?, 55

Categorization

• SEED: Angles into a piece on how methodological poverty—not wrong ideas—explains failed intellectual movements, from realism to early behavioral economics.
• XREF: connects to: Realism survives only in a domesticated form, largely ignored in practice. — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 265; Legal Realism was method-agnostic, accepting lawyers’ intuition and social science alike. — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 258