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This chapter illustrates that the quest for principle in American jurisprudence ought not to be regarded merely as a response to realism. It specifically attempts to make sense of process jurisprudence. It needs to determine the emergence of another basic concept in American legal thought: the concept of principle. Henry Hart and Albert Sacks' The Legal Process is the classic text of post-war process jurisprudence. Policies may be good or bad; but principles of constitutional law ought to be neutral. The discussions on the jurisprudence of prudence and the persistence of process are offered. It also draws the evolution of process thinking in American jurisprudence. In drawing this evolution, it shows how the theme of reason has acquired near-paradigmatic status in American legal thought.

During a crucial formative period in Australian legal education—the 1950s and 1960s—Australian legal academics looked wistfully at the United States and became increasingly critical of English legal educational models. As explained in the first section of this chapter, this admiration was not accompanied by the wholesale adoption of the leading US approaches but rather signalled the fledging academy’s high ambitions for Australian legal education and Australian law. Their ambitions and the way that they conceptualized law along the lines of the US model, rather than English tendencies, refutes common characterizations of this generation and their contributions. The second section explains that the Legal Process school played a critical role in the development of Australia’s first law textbooks. The only Australian textbook to fully embody an American conceptualization of law was inspired by the Hart and Sacks model. Despite enthusiasm for American legal realism, Australia’s early law textbooks and teaching did not adopt a functionalist conceptualization of law. Finally, this chapter considers some ways that American ideas and models served as vehicles for the liberation and restraint of Australian ideas and practices and contributed to the subordination of Australian legal thought.

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.

This chapter explores the role, and the reticence, of the legal academic community in the civil rights revolution era. While Alexander Bickel, Herbert Wechsler, Charles Black, Harry Edwards, and Louis Pollak took part, others, like Gerald Gunther and Paul Freund urged caution on the courts and the executive branch. The legal process school raised questions about the reasoning in Brown, and some academics like Robert Bork, Derrick Bell, and Raoul Berger, for disparate reasons, found Brown v. Board wanting. But for legal academics, Brown has become a touchstone. Efforts to "get right" with it still power academic conversations about the role of the courts in society and politics.

The Introduction discusses the origins, ambition, approach, and structure of the Model Penal Code, connecting the Code’s structure to that of the book. Topics addressed include the origin of the Model Penal Code as a project by the American Law Institute to fundamentally rethink and revise American criminal law. The Model Penal Code’s treatmentist approach is discussed and illustrated. Readers are introduced to the two-part structure of the Code, a Model Penal Code and a Model Correctional Code. The Model Penal Code is introduced as the key to American criminal law, with particular attention to its central definition of crime in section 1.02. Finally, the Model Penal Code’s three-part scheme for the analysis of criminal liability is laid out.