As the legal primitivism of the late 19th century reached its apex in the massive works of comparison and universal theory, a counter-reaction was already being formulated. The new approach to law that was inspired by the emerging social sciences was variously called realism or functionalism. Although there were many differences, these scholars had in common the tendency to view law as behavior in a social setting, rather than a set of rules. The old rule-based theories understood law as a system of norms into which facts were subsumed. Realism and functionalism, to quote a famous example by Holmes, thought that: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development . . . it cannot be dealt with as if it contained the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics” (Holmes 2004: 1).