13. Catalytic Agents?

Abstract

In the 1940s and 1950s, Henry Hart and Albert Sacks devised their Legal Process model and materials to help students distinguish the contributions of diverse legal institutions. Lon Fuller expanded on these views to argue for creating lawyers as social architects, able to deploy insights from both legislative and adjudicative processes. This chapter investigates the influence of Fuller’s views on two Canadian law faculties. At the University of Toronto, James Milner incorporated Fuller’s ideas into his contracts casebook and his leadership on legal education. Milner’s untimely death in 1969 cut short the development of these ideas. By contrast, they flourished at McGill University, largely through the influence of dean Roderick Macdonald, whose own master’s thesis on Fuller (undertaken at Toronto) animated and instigated a lifelong project on legal pluralism. By tracing these divergent intellectual lineages, this chapter explores the historical contingency of legal consciousness. It interrogates the hegemonic interpretation that the Harvard Law School has one signature legacy for legal education. And it suggests that the study of legal education transplants has as much to learn from the granular study of relationships and intellectual influences as it does from the artifacts and stories of curricular and institutional design.