Distinction between Scandinavian and legal realism
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SCANDINAVIAN
The jurisprudential movement known as Scandinavian Legal Realism was founded by the Swedish philosopher Axel Hägerström and the Danish philosopher and jurist Alf Ross in order to destroy the distorting influence of metaphysics upon legal thinking and to provide the secure philosophical foundation
LEGAL REALISM
Legal realism is a naturalistic approach to law and is the view that jurisprudence should emulate the methods of natural science, i.e., rely on empirical evidence. Hypotheses have to be tested against observations of the world.
Legal realists believe that the legal science should investigate law exclusively with the value-free methods of natural sciences, also called 'sciences of the real' in some Continental languages (e.g., 'Realwissenschaften', in German). Some legal realists (e.g., Leon Petrażycki and Max Weber) also hold that there should exist, too, a legal dogmatics, which is independent of legal science proper but, this notwithstanding, can be regarded as a science in its own right (and so, despite its being a non-real, or formal, science). However, the focus of all legal realists is on legal science proper.