Law in action scholars often start with observations about the behavior of institutions and work "backwards" toward the legal philosophies guiding courts and traditional jurisprudence.
As Kenneth B. Davis, Jr., Dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School has stated, "'Law in Action' .
means that in teaching and research, no matter how interesting we find a legal theory, we always need to ask, 'How does this affect people's lives in the real world?'"
The first reference to Law in Action may have been a 1910 article by Roscoe Pound, the Harvard Law School dean whose work was a forerunner to the legal realism movement.
The law in action concept was a natural fit for Wisconsin because of its strong emphasis on the social sciences and the Wisconsin Idea—the concept that the boundaries of campus are the boundaries of the state.