Introduction
This report surveys the major perspectives in jurisprudence and assesses which best captures the contemporary U.S. Supreme Court. It first examines decision‑making models—formalist, attitudinal, and multi‑modal—and what they reveal about the Court’s sparse use of explicit moral reasoning. It then turns to positivism, Dworkin’s interpretivism, and formalism, clarifying how validity, text, and institutional authority shape adjudication. Next, it explores realist and Critical Legal Studies critiques, highlighting narrative, power, and “jurisprudential ambivalence” in cases like Boumediene. Finally, it analyzes Dworkinian themes in the Roberts Court’s originalism and dissents, asking whether today’s Court practices integrity or fragments among competing methods.
Modern jurisprudence about the Supreme Court can be mapped across several major perspectives—legal formalism, legal positivism, natural law and Dworkinian interpretivism, American Legal Realism and Critical Legal Studies (CLS), and contemporary originalism and textualism. Across these perspectives, a common theme emerges: the Court publicly presents itself as constrained by text, history, and precedent, while ideology, narrative, and moral judgment operate more implicitly. The resulting picture is a methodologically self‑conscious but internally divided institution whose dominant practice is best characterized as positivist‑leaning, text‑ and history‑centered formalism, tempered by realist awareness and episodic moral‑principled reasoning.
Formalist or “legal model” accounts depict justices as professionals bound by objective legal sources—constitutional and statutory text, precedent, and framers’ intent—deciding cases by applying these materials through doctrinal reasoning and collegial deliberation.[1][3] In its strongest form, formalism imagines judges “calling balls and strikes,” insisting that results flow from legal rules rather than judicial will. Citation‑based studies of Supreme Court opinions support part of this self‑image: textualism and precedent are by far the most invoked modes of reasoning, with structural arguments and prudential considerations also present, while explicit appeals to history’s “national ethos,” originalism as a distinct technique, and overt moral reasoning appear comparatively rarely in written opinions.[2] This surface pattern reinforces a picture of law as a limited domain, where valid norms are those traceable to institutional sources and applied through rule‑governed methods.
Legal positivism offers a theoretical underpinning for this domain‑bounded image. Its central “Validity Thesis” holds that what counts as law is determined by social criteria of recognition—embodied in a rule‑of‑recognition practice—without any necessary dependence on moral truth.[1] To call a statute or will “legally valid” is both to report that it meets these criteria and to assert that courts are obligated to treat it as binding.[1] This dual aspect maps onto the Court’s recurrent rhetoric: when a majority insists it must enforce Congress’s words “as written” or adhere to a constitutional provision despite policy misgivings, it is implicitly invoking positivist ideas of validity and institutional duty, not natural law claims about what is morally best. Crucially, positivism is a theory about what law is, not a theory about how judges must decide cases; a justice can be positivist about validity yet reject mechanical adjudication.[4][5]
Dworkinian interpretivism directly contests this positivist separation of law and morality. On Dworkin’s view, hard cases like Riggs v. Palmer or TVA v. Hill reveal that disputes are not simply about the content of rules but about which principles properly belong in the law in the first place.[2] Law, on this account, is not a closed set of rules but the product of constructive interpretation of the institutional record in its best moral light—“law as integrity.” There is, in principle, a right answer in contested cases, obtainable by reading doctrine, precedent, and text as parts of a coherent scheme of political morality. Historically, major decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, and more recently the Dobbs dissent, exemplify this approach: they foreground the purposes and moral aspirations of constitutional guarantees (equality, liberty, dignity, reliance) rather than their strictly original public meaning.[1] These opinions treat the Constitution as a charter of principle whose meaning must be developed over time in light of evolving understandings of justice.
American Legal Realism and CLS, by contrast, emphasize that judicial decisions often track judges’ policy preferences, social context, and strategic narratives more than determinate rules. Empirical “attitudinal models” show that case outcomes can be predicted with substantial accuracy from ideological variables, party alignment, and issue area, challenging the claim that law alone explains results.[1][3] Realism insists that rules underdetermine outcomes, leaving space for judicial choice; CLS adds that the very languages of rights, neutrality, and constraint can themselves serve to legitimize existing hierarchies. Narrative approaches recast competing jurisprudential traditions—natural law, positivism, liberal legalism, statism—as literary myths: romance, comedy, irony, and tragedy.[1] Liberal constitutionalism’s reformist optimism appears as “comedy,” while realism and CLS function as “comic irony,” exposing as contingent and power‑laden what formalist or natural‑law narratives present as rational or inevitable. From this vantage, doctrinal tests, appeals to “neutral principles,” and even methodological labels like “originalism” are not ideologically innocent but narrative strategies that frame law as either emancipatory or as the tragic maintenance of order.[1][5]
Recent scholarship highlights that much confusion in these debates stems from conflating distinct questions. Positivism (what counts as law) is often mistakenly equated with “closed‑system” formalism (how judges decide), even though leading positivists deny that rules mechanically produce single outcomes.[3][4] Realists focused primarily on adjudication, not metaphysical claims about the nature of law, and their critiques target the gap between formal doctrine and actual judicial behavior.[3] Modern statutory interpretation exhibits what some call “jurisprudential ambivalence”: textualism and originalism are presented as constraint‑enforcing formalist projects, yet sophisticated exponents still rely on discretionary judgment, policy concerns, and background purposes when resolving ambiguities or applying canons.[4] This hybrid practice suggests that even justices publicly committed to constrained methods cannot fully escape realist dynamics.
Contemporary originalism and textualism, especially under the Roberts Court, have become the dominant, self‑consciously articulated methodologies. A prominent strand—sometimes called “tradition‑based originalism”—ties constitutional meaning to longstanding historical practices, religious and civic customs, and “lived experience.” In cases involving the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, for example, majorities have rejected overarching theories (like strict separationism) in favor of tests rooted in history and tradition (e.g., American Legion, Town of Greece, Hosanna‑Tabor, Our Lady of Guadalupe).[3] This approach promises stability and judicial restraint by anchoring interpretation in what the American people have long done, rather than in judges’ contemporary moral theorizing. Yet, from a Dworkinian or natural‑law perspective, it raises a tension: past practice may itself be morally suspect, and equating integrity with historical consistency risks sidelining principled critique of unjust traditions.
Parallel to this, living constitutionalism and principle‑heavy reasoning persist, but more often in dissents or in specific rights domains. The Dobbs joint dissent, for instance, stresses precedent, reliance interests, and evolving conceptions of women’s equality and bodily autonomy to argue that the Fourteenth Amendment protects abortion rights despite contrary historical and textual readings.[1] Earlier rights‑expanding decisions similarly draw on broad moral understandings of liberty, dignity, and equality. In national security and due process contexts, cases like Boumediene v. Bush can be read as liberal, due‑process‑oriented “comedy,” foregrounding individual rights against state power, while critics cast them in “tragic” terms as overreaches that compromise security.[2] These conflicts are not only doctrinal but narrative: they stage competing stories about what the Constitution is for—protection of individuals, preservation of tradition, or maintenance of order.
Against this backdrop, natural law reasoning—understood as explicit appeal to objective moral goods, human dignity, or the common good as legal determinants—has a relatively modest on‑the‑surface presence in modern Supreme Court opinions. Empirical analyses show that “moral reasoning” as a distinct mode is infrequently cited compared to text, precedent, and structural arguments.[2] However, natural law‑inflected concerns may appear implicitly, smuggled into other modes such as broad readings of “liberty,” substantive conceptions of due process, or invocations of “tradition” and “national ethos.” Interpretivists and natural lawyers might argue that when the Court chooses among plausible textual readings by reference to fundamental rights or human flourishing, it is in effect relying on moral criteria while formally speaking the language of validity, history, or institutional competence.
Putting these strands together, the major jurisprudential perspectives interact on the Court rather than operating in isolation. Formalism and positivism shape the public frame: law is portrayed as a distinct, source‑based domain where judges enforce texts and precedents. Realism and attitudinal findings reveal that ideology, policy, and case facts systematically influence outcomes, and that claims of neutrality often conceal contested value judgments. CLS and narrative theory illuminate how legal reasoning styles themselves carry ideological and aesthetic choices about whether law is portrayed as romance, comedy, irony, or tragedy. Dworkinian interpretivism and related natural law approaches offer a normative ideal of coherence in principle, urging judges to read the legal record as part of a morally unified scheme of political rights, even where this means confronting or revising entrenched traditions.
In practice, the Supreme Court today is best described as predominantly positivist‑leaning and formalist in rhetoric and methodology—especially through textualism and tradition‑based originalism—while being realist in effect and only selectively Dworkinian or natural‑law‑oriented. The Court rarely presents itself as making openly moral or dignity‑based judgments; instead, it embeds those judgments within debates over history, precedent, and institutional role. Integrity, in Dworkin’s sense of principled coherence, remains an embattled aspiration that surfaces most clearly in landmark rights cases and dissents, rather than a consistently governing method. The resulting jurisprudence is multi‑voiced and ambivalent: constrained by sources in form, shaped by ideology and narrative in function, and intermittently driven by moral principle where the stakes of justice are most visible.
Conclusion
Across these perspectives, the Supreme Court emerges as neither a pure formalist oracle nor a candid moral philosopher. Positivist and formalist vocabularies of validity, text, and precedent dominate, while attitudinal and realist accounts reveal ideological and narrative undercurrents. Natural law and overt moral reasoning appear mostly at the margins, often smuggled in through modes like structuralism, tradition, and rights-based rhetoric. The Roberts Court’s tradition‑inflected originalism and selective appeals to integrity suggest a predominantly positivist‑originalist practice, tempered by realist awareness and occasional Dworkinian dissents. In this sense, contemporary jurisprudence on the Court is best described as methodologically plural, with moral judgment operating implicitly rather than avowedly.
Sources
[1] Decision-Making and Supreme Court, EBSCO Research Starters – https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/decision-making-and-supreme-court
[2] How Supreme Court Justices Reach Their Decisions, SCOTUSblog – https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/07/how-supreme-court-justices-reach-their-decisions
[3] Competing Theories of Judicial Decision Making: Formalism, Illinois Supreme Court Review – https://www.illinoissupremecourtreview.com/2021/03/competing-theories-of-judicial-decision-making-formalism/
[4] Florida Law Review, “Legal Positivism and American Case Law,” https://www.floridalawreview.com/article/79823-legal-positivism-and-american-case-law/attachment/165776.pdf
[5] “Introduction to Law Series: Dworkin,” https://drjorge.world/2025/04/30/introduction-to-law-series-dworkin
[6] Cornell Law Review, “Legal Positivism” (Vol. 82:1080), https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2705&context=clr
[7] Brian Leiter, “Positivism, Formalism, Realism,” University of Chicago Public Law & Legal Theory Working Paper / Journal Article, https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5995&context=journal_articles
[8] Erin F. Delaney Moncrieff, “Statutory Realism,” Rutgers University Law Review, https://rutgerslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/72_Rutgers_Univ_L_Rev_0039_Moncrieff.pdf
[9] West, “Jurisprudence as Narrative: An Aesthetic Analysis of Modern Legal Theory,” Georgetown Law Faculty Publications – https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/context/facpub/article/1495/viewcontent/west_jurisprudence_narrative_2.pdf
[10] Christiansen, “Jurisprudence: Natural Law vs. Legal Positivism,” Medium – https://medium.com/@noahjchristiansen/jurisprudence-natural-law-vs-legal-positivism-c9828c46ab4e
[11] EBSCO Research Starters, “Jurisprudence” – https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/jurisprudence
[12] “Constitutional Interpretation: Legal Realism, Originalism, and Living Constitutionalism,” HeinOnline Blog – https://home.heinonline.org/blog/2023/10/constitutional-interpretation-legal-realism-originalism-and-living-constitutionalism/
[13] Sherif Girgis, “Tradition-Based Originalism and the Supreme Court,” National Affairs – https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/tradition-based-originalism-and-the-supreme-cour
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