Legal process (jurisprudence)

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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. [1] 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. To this day, the school's influence remains broad.

Contents

Basic precepts

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.

See also

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References

  1. Donald A. Dripps, Justice Harlan on Criminal Procedure: Two Cheers for the Legal Process School, 3 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. 125 Archived 2010-06-21 at the Wayback Machine , 126 (2005).
  2. 1 2 Ernest Young, Institutional Settlement in a Globalizing Judicial System, 54 Duke L. J. 1143, 1150 (2005).
  3. 1 2 3 Richard H. Fallon, Jr., Reflections on the Hart and Wechsler Paradigm, 47 Vand. L. Rev. 953, 964-6 (1994).
  4. 1 2 3 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).
  5. Herbert Wechsler, Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law, 73 Harv. L Rev. 1 (1959).
  6. Kent Greenawalt, The Enduring Significance of Neutral Principles, 78 Colum. L. Rev. 982 (1978).
  7. Antonin Scalia, The Rule of Law as a Law of Rules, 56 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1175 (1989).