|
Sponsored Links
The legal process school (sometimes "legal process theory") was a movement within American law that attempted to chart a third way between legal formalism and legal realism. Drawing its name from Hart & Sacks' textbook The Legal Process (along with Hart & Wechsler's textbook The Federal Courts and the Federal System considered a primary canonical text of the school), it is associated with scholars such as Herbert Wechsler, Henry Hart, Albert Sacks and Lon Fuller, and their students such as John Hart Ely and Alexander Bickel. The school grew in the 1950s and 1960s, but began to wane in the 1970s and 1980s in large part because its methodological assumptions foreclosed the use of courts as an engine for social change (cf. judicial activism). Nevertheless, the school's influence remains broad. Although quite rich and deep in detail, the basic precepts of the school are Although legal process is no longer popular by name, particularly in the academy, it can be seen as harmonizing with both major modern schools of judicial thought, textualism and purposivism, depending on which of the foregoing assumptions are emphasized. (References Herbert Wechsler, Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law, 73 Harv. L Rev. 1 (1959); Greenawalt, The Enduring Significance of Neutral Principles, 78 Colum. L. Rev. 982 (1978); Antonin Scalia, The Rule of Law as a Law of Rules, 56 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1175 (1989); Richard H. Fallon, Jr., Reflections on the Hart and Wechsler Paradigm, 47 Vand. L. Rev. 953, 964-6 (1994); Michael Wells, Behind the Parity Debate the Decline of the Legal Process Tradition in the Law of Federal Courts, 71 B.U.L. Rev. 609 (1991); Ernest Young, Institutional Settlement in a Globalizing Judicial System, 54 Duke L. J. 1143, 1150 (2005)).
|
Legal Process Subcategories
Legal Process Articles
|
|
