Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/248115 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Citation: 
[Journal:] European Journal of International Law [ISSN:] 1464-3596 [Volume:] 31 [Issue:] 3 [Publisher:] Oxford University Press [Place:] Oxford [Year:] 2020 [Pages:] 829–855-
Publisher: 
Oxford University Press, Oxford
Abstract: 
Using previously unexploited archival sources and unpublished teaching materials, this article rereads Harold Lasswell and Myres McDougal’s earliest 1943 statement of policy-oriented jurisprudence – what would become known as the ‘New Haven School’ – and examines their wartime careers in government and academia. It breaks with widely held current understandings of the New Haven School. First, Lasswell and McDougal’s work is re-periodized. Instead of a reactionary answer lawyers offered to international relations realists in the 1940s, I argue that policy-oriented jurisprudence was a product of interwar insecurities and the rising culture of American modernism from the 1920s. Second, notwithstanding frequent associations of the jurisprudence with interventionist, anti-communist American foreign policy during the Cold War, the article emphasizes Lasswell and McDougal’s engagement with progressive politics of the early 20th century – New Deal social planning and redistribution; psychoanalytically inspired social critique; Marxism and socialism. Third, I argue that the school’s primary intellectual origins are to be found not in American legal realism or positivist social science, but in philosophical pragmatism and psychoanalysis.
Published Version’s DOI: 
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Accepted Manuscript (Postprint)

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.