In the present interpretation six individuals will be singled out as having made key contributions to the rise of the realist movement between 1914 and 1931: Corbin, Hohfeld, Cook, Underhill Moore, Llewellyn and Oliphant. All but the last of these had close connections with Yale Law School during this period. In 1931 Llewellyn and Frank compiled a list of twenty realists, sixteen of whom had at some time been associated with either Yale or Columbia Law Schools, in several cases with both. Scrutiny of the names of notable omissions from this list suggests no bias in favour of the two law schools on the part of the compilers, but rather the reverse. The fact is that, at least up to 1928, the realist movement, in so far as it was a discrete phenomenon, was based on two law schools. It was in some respects analogous to the Bloomsbury Group, in that there was no defined ‘membership’, no shared dogma, and no concerted programme of action. Rather, the ‘movement’ consisted of a loosely integrated collection of interacting individuals, with a complex network of personal relationships and an almost equally complex family of related ideas, given some coherence, perhaps, by a shared dissatisfaction, not always precisely diagnosed, with the existing intellectual milieu of law in general and legal education in particular.