Wittgenstinian Analysis of Legal Realism

Legal realism comes in many varieties. Some aspects of legal realism focus on the destruction of the idea that the law is objective or determinative. Other legal realists accept that the law is unpredictive but work towards identifying personal and social biases that lie at the root of these changeable interpretations.
While there are these different dimensions of legal realism and not all realists can agree on the views expressed by these different perspectives, it seems that most realists discount the importance of legal rules and principles in determining the outcomes of cases and explaining the phenomenon of law generally. An example of the viewpoint that legal realists espouse can be found in a trusts and estates case where the court rules in a way clearly contrary to the language of the law.

In Riggs v. Palmer, the Court considered whether a grandson who murdered his grandfather so as to receive his inheritance should still get the inheritance. As a matter of the Wills Act, the grandson should have received the inheritance because under the law, when his grandfather created the will, he expressed his intent to give such a gift to his grandson. It didn't matter that at the time of the murder the grandfather would never have intended to give his murderer an inheritance. Under the law, and as the dissent points out, "the matter does not lie within the domain of conscience. We are bound by the rigid rules of law." However, in spite of the clear language of the probate statutes that would have resulted in a judgment for the murderous grandson, the court found that:
The writers of laws do not always express their intention perfectly, but either exceed it or fall short of it, so that judges are to collect it from probable or rational conjectures only, and this is called rational interpretation...When we make use of rational interpretation, sometimes we restrain the meaning of the writer so as to take in less, and sometimes we extend or enlarge his meaning so as to take in more than his words express...