The New Haven School : American International Law

Abstract

This book is an intellectual history of the ‘New Haven School’, a school of legal theory and practice associated with Yale Law School in the city of New Haven. New Haven School ‘policy-oriented jurisprudence’—so-called for its emphasis on using law to pursue acknowledged policy aims—was developed from the 1940s by Harold Lasswell, a central figure of twentieth-century American political science, and Myres McDougal, a prominent international lawyer. The book argues that the New Haven School style of argument was representative of mid-century American international law. Through the biographies and scholarship of Lasswell, McDougal, and New Haven School members, and using previously unexploited archival materials, the book explores how this body of legal theory was shaped and how it influenced the legal arguments made by McDougal and other members of the school in support of Cold War anti-communist policy positions and legal practice of the United States. The book shows that the New Haven School represented a specific anti-formalism and a collection of methods that characterized how American scholars and lawyers practised international law in the middle of the twentieth century, and still do today.