<P> Though many aspects of legal realism are now seen as exaggerated or outdated, most legal theorists would agree that the realists were successful in their central ambition: to refute "formalist" or "mechanical" notions of law and legal reasoning . It is widely accepted today that law is not, and cannot be, an exact science, and that it is important to examine what judges are actually doing in deciding cases, not merely what they say they are doing . As ongoing debates about judicial activism and judicial restraint attest, legal scholars continue to disagree about when, if ever, it is legitimate for judges to "make law," as opposed to merely "following" or "applying" existing law . But few would disagree with the realists' core claim that judges (for good or ill) are often strongly influenced by their political beliefs, their personal values, their individual personalities, and other extra-legal factors . </P> <P> A statistical natural language processing method has been applied to automatically predict the outcome of cases tried by the European Court of Human Rights (violation or no violation of a specific article) based on their textual contents, reaching a prediction accuracy of 79% . A subsequent qualitative analysis of these results provided some support towards the theory of legal realism . The authors write: "In general, and notwithstanding the simplified snapshot of a very complex debate that we just presented, our results could be understood as lending some support to the basic legal realist intuition according to which judges are primarily responsive to non-legal, rather than to legal, reasons when they decide hard cases ." </P>

According to the legal realist school of thought