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

Using previously unexploited archival sources and unpublished teaching materials, this article rereads Harold Lasswell and Myres McDougal’s earliest 1943 statement of policy-oriented jurisprudence – what would become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.