(1) The Law School of the Future: From Legal Realism to Policy Science in the World Community 

(McDougal, Myres)

This address was delivered before the Yale Law School Association on June 17, 1947. In the first section, entitled "From Legal Realism to Policy Science," Professor McDougal summarizes a proposed reorientation of legal education. In the second section, "Objectives at Yale," Professor McDougal indicates the present impact of this proposed reorientation on the Yale Law School curriculum. The Editors of the Journal wish to thank the Yale Law School Association for the opportunity of presenting to a wider audience Professor McDougal's views on the function of the law school.

(2) Jurisprudence for a Free Society 

(McDougal, Myres)

The search for a jurisprudence, a theory about law, appropriate for a free society, has long been a subject of concern to legal scholars. In attempting to make some modest contribution to this search, the major themes and arguments I will explore are as follows: first, the intimate interrelations of law and public order in any community; second, the intellectual functions required of a useful jurisprudence or theory about law; third, the most important contributions of past schools of jurisprudence to a useful theory about law; fourth, the basic pattern of a policy-oriented approach to inquiry about law; fifth, and finally, some of the conditions for promoting a public order of freedom and human dignity.

(3) The New Haven School: A Brief Introduction 

(Reisman, W. Michael; Wiessner, Siegfried; Willard, Andrew).

The New Haven School defines law as a process of decision that is both authoritative and controlling; it places past such decisions in the illuminating light of their conditioning factors, both environmental and predispositional, and appraises decision trends for their compatibility with clarified goals; it forecasts, to the extent possible, alternative future decisions and their consequences; and it provides conceptual tools for those using it to invent and appraise alternative decisions, constitutive arrangements, and courses of action using the guiding light of a preferred future world public order of human dignity. To achieve these goals, the New Haven School adapts focal lenses from the social sciences, a mode of organizing data about various social processes though cultural anthropology's modality of phase analysis and an analytical break-down of the actual components of a decision. To facilitate actual decision-making, it proposes a praxis of five intellectual tasks: goal formulation, trend description, factor analysis, projection of future decisions, and the invention of alternatives. A public order of human dignity is defined as one which approximates the optimum access by all human beings to all things they cherish: power, wealth, enlightenment, skill, well-being, affection, respect, and rectitude. This, in a nutshell, characterizes the contribution the New Haven School has made to the law's academic and policy enterprise.

(4) The Comparative Study of Law for Policy Purposes: Value Clarification as an Instrument of Democratic World Order 

(McDougal, Myres)

In a world shrinking at an ever-accelerating rate because of a relentlessly expanding, uniformity-imposing technology, both opportunity and need for the comparative study of law are unprecedented. In this contemporary world, people are increasingly demanding common values that transcend the boundaries of nation-states; they are increasingly interdependent in fact, irrespective of nation-state boundaries, for controlling the conditions which affect the securing of their values; and they are becoming ever more realistic in their consciousness of such interdependences, and hence widening their identifications to include in their demands more and more of their fellow men. These changing perspectives of peoples the world over stimulate in turn ever intensifying demands for wider and wider political co-operation, for the more and more effective use of conjoined community power, for securing newly clarified and established goals.

(5) Human Rights in World Public Order: Human Rights in Comprehensive Context 

(McDougal, Myres; Chen, Lung-chu; Lasswell, Harold)

The demands for human rights being made today around the world are heir to all the great historic movements for human freedom, equality and solidarity—including the English, American, French, Russian and Chinese revolutions and the events they set in train. They derive also from the more enduring elements in the traditions both of natural law and natural rights and of most of the world's great religions and philosophies. They achieve support, further, from the findings of modern science about the close link between simple respect for human dignity and the shaping and sharing of all other values. It has been many times observed how rudimentary demands for freedom from despotic executive tyranny have gradually been transformed into demands for protection against not only the executive but all institutions or functions of government and all private coercion. Early demands for the barest "civil liberties," inherent in the most primitive conception of rule by law, have burgeoned into insistence upon comprehensive "human rights"—that is, into demands for effective participation in all community value processes and for wide sharing in all the values upon which even minimum civil liberties depend.

(6) Theory About Law: Jurisprudence for a Free Society 

(Reisman, W.)

Theory about law was the center of Myres McDougal's intellectual enterprise. Each of his treatises and monographs, even his occasional papers and court pleadings, every dissertation, and, as many of you here know, every student paper done under his supervision, was and had to be an explicit and intentional application of his theory. Whether it was resource use and planning in the Connecticut Valley, in the oceans, or in outer space, whether it was the law of war or human rights, treaty interpretation or constitutional interpretation, each study tried to be an integrated application of the theory.

(7) Theories About International Law: Prologue to a Configurative Jurisprudence 

(McDougal, Myres; Lasswell, Harold; Reisman, W. Michael)

Theories about international law, like the forms of action in Maitland's conception, have unhappily the power of ruling us from their graves. "There is a subtle interaction," wrote the late Professor Brierly in his own somewhat quixotic search for "the basis of obligation in international law," "between theory and practice in politics, not always easy to trace because the actors themselves may easily be unconscious of their theoretical prepossessions which, nevertheless, powerfully influence their whole attitude towards practical affairs; and at no time has it been so important, as it is today, that we should see the facts of international life as they really are, and not as they come to us reflected in false or outworn theories." It is the purpose of this essay, through selective canvass of our inherited theories about international law, to consider the potential contributions of such theories to a comprehensive jurisprudence of international law which will not impede, but creatively facilitate, the thinking of all whose choices and activities must affect the quality of emerging international law and public order. In the course of this canvass of past theories we will explore the need for a more viable jurisprudence of international law, the appropriate criteria for evaluating such a jurisprudence, the trends in approximation to such criteria exhibited by past theories, the factors which have affected past achievement, possible future developments, and some conceivable alternatives for a more configurative, hence viable, jurisprudence.

(8) A Policy-Oriented Approach to Development 

(Reisman, W.)

This article examines the assumptions and values behind traditional notions of development. It argues that the optimal status of any community is not the achievement of a specific level of development, but rather the maintenance of an ongoing development process. A community must respond creatively and innovatively to technological, environmental and political changes.

(9) Development and Nation-Building: A Framework for Policy-Oriented Inquiry

(Reisman, W. Michael)

We use the term "development" to refer to decision processes and decision outcomes which have been designed to induce the shaping and sharing of all values within and among territorial communities in ways and with consequences approximating the goal values of a world order of human dignity.  The component of purposive direction toward these postulated goal values distinguishes development from social change more generally. Social change, it will be noted, is an ineluctable feature of social process, for all actors are constantly seeking to change parts of the social process with the aim of making it discriminate in their favor. Hence social change is of no intrinsic interest to the policy-oriented approach to development. Development, in contrast, implies specific scope values with respect to which strategies for securing selective changes are invented and against which change-flows in decision structures and in the production and distribution of values are constantly evaluated. Thus, from a policy-oriented perspective, not all change is considered to be development; changes incompatible with human dignity can be characterized as retrogressions or as "disdevelopmental."

(10) The Legal Architecture of Nation-Building 

(Norchi, Charles)

The fundamental question is how to bring a population from a condition of hopelessness to one of self-governance, sustainable growth, and viable participation in the world community. As Michael Reisman has asked, “[w]hat are the strategies available to communities in transition, for their process of redefinition, and what role should the international community—an increasingly effective participant in all these subcommunities—take in the process?”  From the standpoint of the legal profession, is there a portfolio of tasks and methods that are especially applicable to nation-building efforts and that signal a new moment or pivotal role for the lawyer in state reconstruction and the associated work of nation-building?