Twenty years after the first publication of The Bramble Bush, Karl Llewellyn decided to abandon his attempts to make substantial revisions to the text because ‘the young fellow who wrote those lectures just isn't here any more’ (below, p. 151). It is over twenty years since I began work on Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement and nearly fourteen since the manuscript was delivered to the publishers. I am naturally delighted that Weidenfeld and Nicolson has decided to re-issue it and that it will simultaneously be produced for the first time in the United States by the publishers of The Cheyenne Way. No doubt to the relief of both, I have decided to follow Llewellyn's example and refrain from revising the text. I have, however, taken the opportunity presented by an invitation to deliver the John Dewey Lecture at New York University Law School in October 1984 to take a fresh look at Legal Realism and to comment on some of the more interesting recent research and writing on the subject. The published version of this lecture will indicate some changes in perspective and emphasis, but I hope that it will serve to scotch suggestions of premature senility or radical changes of mind. It also makes it possible to keep this postscript quite brief.

In the period since 1970 there have been significant developments both in relevant specialized work and in the general intellectual climates of academic law in the United States and the United Kingdom.