Jerome Frank

Jerome N. Frank (1889–1957) was one of the founders of American legal realism. A nonacademic scholar, Frank concentrated his enquiry on the nature of the judge’s decision-making process, underlining its authoritative character.Through arguments developed from Freudian psychoanalysis and Piaget’s educational theories, these aspects are the basis of the thesis of the unpredictability of judicial decisions and, ultimately, the falsification of the principle of legal certainty. In the more mature phase of his output, a further field of research emerges, concerning the relationship between “government of laws” and “government of men” in the context of a reflection on the American democratic model.