Educating American Lawyers: The New Haven School’s Jurisprudence of Personal Character

Abstract

Abstract Using previously unexploited archival sources and unpublished teaching materials, this article rereads Harold Lasswell and Myres McDougal’s earliest 1943 statement of policy-oriented jurisprudence – what would become known as the ‘New Haven School’ – and examines their wartime careers in government and academia. It breaks with widely held current understandings of the New Haven School. First, Lasswell and McDougal’s work is re-periodized. Instead of a reactionary answer lawyers offered to international relations realists in the 1940s, I argue that policy-oriented jurisprudence was a product of interwar insecurities and the rising culture of American modernism from the 1920s. Second, notwithstanding frequent associations of the jurisprudence with interventionist, anti-communist American foreign policy during the Cold War, the article emphasizes Lasswell and McDougal’s engagement with progressive politics of the early 20th century – New Deal social planning and redistribution; psychoanalytically inspired social critique; Marxism and socialism. Third, I argue that the school’s primary intellectual origins are to be found not in American legal realism or positivist social science, but in philosophical pragmatism and psychoanalysis.