As a form of jurisprudence, legal realism is defined by its focus on the law as it actually exists in practice, rather than how it exists on the books. To this end, it was primarily concerned with the actions of judges and the factors that influenced processes of judicial decision making. As Karl Llewellyn argues, “ehind decisions stand judges; judges are men; as men they have human backgrounds.” The law, therefore, did not exist in a metaphysical realm of fundamental rules or principles, but was inseparable from human action and the power of judges to determine the law. In order to understand the decisions and actions of legal actors, legal realists turned to the ideas of the social sciences in order to understand the human behavior and relationships that culminated in a given legal outcome.