Legal Science or a Cult of Style?
Lasswell, McDougal, and an asylum whose Airbnb reviews have all been written by the inmates.
Rob James
June 15, 2026
I made it through Yale Law School and nearly forty-four years of private practice, and in all that time practically my only serious exposure to the New Haven School of law, science and policy (I’ll call it LSP) had been a portrait.
In Room 127 there was a painting of Myres S. McDougal, seated and clad in shades of blue, holding his massive tome Law and Public Order in Space. Indeed he was depicted looking upwards toward the heavens. McDougal retired before I arrived. I heard from an older student that though born in Mississippi, this unassuming Rhodes scholar had acquired and retained a high-pitched British accent.
My luck changed this past month as I was researching the public law of outer space, an area I wrote a fair amount about during law practice and am pursuing further in retirement. I may not be a “lawyer-statesman” in the terminology of Anthony T. Kronman, The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession (1993), but at least I ventured into professional associations, nonprofit leadership for youth and persons with disabilities, pro bono services on disaster recovery and climate change, law school speeches, and published or posted articles. Now that I am free of client attachments and billable-hour expectations, we will see where my more purely public-arena activities take me.
Anyway, the very first articles I encountered relevant to my new space-law topic were Developing a Global Order for Space Resources: A Regime Evolution Approach, 52 Georgetown J. Int’l L. 57 (2020) and From “Space Law” to “Space Governance”: A Policy-Oriented Perspective on International Law and Outer Space Activities, 64 Harvard J. Int’l L. 385 (2023). The author was a graduate student under the deep tutelage of W. Michael Reisman, who is the latter-day torch-carrier for LSP. Don’t get me wrong, apart from the analytical apparatus I describe here, both articles are excellent and contain much helpful information and interesting conclusions to which I will respond.
Both articles cited a work Reisman co-authored, The New Haven School of International Law: A Brief Introduction, 32 Yale J. Int’l L. 575 (2007). And when I dug a bit further, I found that almost every other author referencing LSP cites the first major article, Harold D. Lasswell & Myres S. McDougal, Legal Education and Public Policy: Professional Training in the Public Interest, 52 Yale L.J. 203 (1943).
This is great, I thought. With all these articles to work from, I would finally understand what was going on in this tradition!
As I did a further literature search, I kept getting hits to Lasswell & McDougal. Or McDougal & Reisman. Or McDougal, Reisman and another acolyte. There was a 2008 symposium, but again it only recited the acolytes. Over and over again, only the members of the club were citing each other.
I grew suspicious. What was going on?
The LSP school appears to be historically important, and a precursor to major law-school movements that are in full flower today. However, in its purebred form, it appears isolated to acolytes in a kind of hand-to-hand apostolic succession. I collect here some reactions to their complex prose style, as well as some gist of the substance of their thought.
1. Attacks on the LSP Prose Style.
The prose is often, uh, intimidating. As soon as I started reading, I encountered this:
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 decisionmaking, 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.
Uh oh.
This was direct evidence of what I had always heard—that this school of thought had a highly inflected idiolect, a special language known to intimates and used as a shibboleth against others. It reminded me of the World War II code talkers (many tribes, not just Navajos).
We parodied the style in our comedy show, the Yale Law Revue. Listen to future U.S. congressman Sam Coppersmith from 1981:
Preparation MR
“Several thousand pages, many of them different.”
Jacques Barzun distinguishes the clear prose of William James from Harold Lasswell saying “crime doesn’t pay”:
If enforcible deprivations are provided for deviational conduct, the mature members of the community are expected to take these possible deprivations into account as potential costs in assessing the balance of indulgence and deprivation attendant upon behavioral alternatives.
In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell had made a joke about translating Ecclesiastes into modern jargon. But Lasswell’s lingo was no jest.
Another critic in the Vanderbilt Law Review had some fun with the LSP guys:
In order to know what the authors attempt in Law and Public Order in Space we need only wrestle with their own statement: “The basic design of our book is the modality of policy-oriented jurisprudence: we first seek to identify the major recurring types of problems-that is, types of controposed claims to authoritative decision which raise common issues in policy and which are affected by common conditioning factors-and to locate these problems in their most comprehensive context of community process; we then proceed to explore each major type of problem by employing the various relevant intellectual techniques of policy-oriented inquiry, including the detailed clarification and recommendation of general community policies, the description of past trends in decision on comparable problems, appraisal of the factors which appear to have affected past decision, the projection of probable future conditioning factors and decisions, and the recommendation of alternatives in policy content and procedures more appropriately designed to secure overriding community goals.”
The eminent law and economics scholar Henry Manne recalls:
I went to Yale Law School on a post-graduate fellowship and discovered a man named Myres McDougal, who was one of the more famous law professors of the era. He and Harold Lasswell, the famous political scientist, had devised a schemata for using the social sciences to approach law. It was called Law, Science, and Policy. All graduate students were required to immerse themselves in this, if you’ll pardon me, garbage. I say “garbage” because I think there’s only one rigorous social science and that’s economics, and Law, Science, and Policy had no economics in it whatsoever. What they thought they were doing, I don’t know. Today there are no remnants of it around.
Another student reminisces:
When I took International Law at Virginia, it turned out to be a course not about law but about the legal methodology of Myres McDougal. I hated it. No, I mean I hated it. Incomprehensible mumbo jumbo.
2. The LSP Disciples Strike Back
The defenses I found of LSP style—all by LSP adherents—are tenacious, tendentious, and downright amusing. Princeton political scientist Richard Falk fired away:
The stylistic criticism is unfounded. McDougal strives to achieve clear and precise expression. His sentences are almost always impossible to improve upon. This is a complicated endeavor and requires an elaborate intellectual apparatus. It would not occur to anyone to complain about Einsteinian theories of physical reality on the ground that they were abstruse and not readily susceptible to lay understanding. Why should a reader be entitled to grasp McDougal's ideas on international law without special effort and training? We confront an insidious form of anti-intellectualism whenever we meet the argument that legal analysis must be carried on in a fashion that requires its meaning to be evident to the uninitiated or hurried reader.
Arthur Corbin points out that Wesley Hohfeld’s analytic system of “fundamental legal conceptions” “also disturbed [professors’] mental complacency.”
A defender agreed LSP authors use a “meta-linguistic terminology” but said doing otherwise would be “like trying tomultiply 867 by 493 using Roman numerals.”
One defender, perhaps a distant LSP alumnus, did concede that “It is true that the writings of McDougal and Lasswell are not models of clarity—Strunk and White would not be happy.”
It is all reminiscent of the special pleading for Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, or the contemporary authors lampooned by B. R. Myers in A Reader’s Manifesto. If you can’t understand what the Great Thinker has written in complicated prose, the prose is complicated because the thoughts are Great Thoughts and it is you who are the problem.
3. The LSP Substance
Okay, that was fun.
Tony Kronman’s book is the first and only resource I found discussing LSP from outside the tradition. In other words, it is the only Yelp review not written by someone who works at the restaurant.
Tony characterizes LSP as a development following the peak of the legal realists, with Jerome Frank bringing a psychological approach to each individual judge’s life experiences. LSP authors recapitulated some of the social-scientific aspirations of Langdell and Beale, even echoing the geometric dreams of Thomas Hobbes.
Tony notes that LSP spawned two groups of strange bedfellows, Richard Posner and the Law and Economics movement and Roberto Unger and the Critical Legal Studies movement. Despite many differences in disciplines and politics, they share with LSP an overarching social-scientific or philosophical approach to interaction of legal actors, in opposition to the application of prudential statesmanship to specific cases.
Tony’s book was reviewed by about two dozen critics, who attempted to fault his history (were lawyer-statesmen ever all that prevalent?), his presumed politics (isn’t an interest in a “political fraternity” arch-conservative?) and his diversity credentials (where were the civil-rights and interest-group lawyer-statespeople?). Not a single review of those I skimmed contradicted his view of LSP, though. A couple of them did cite that 1943 article, probably because an editor on the law review told them they had to have a footnote. (If so, this would help prove Tony’s point that much of contemporary legal literature, whether clerk-authored opinions or 2L-edited journal articles, is enabled by students for the edification of students. We lawyers are truly dealing in the products of a Children’s Crusade.)
Their goal was to displace narrow law-specific thinking in favor or the mighty tools of the social sciences. The “law job” (using Karl Llewellyn’s term) was not a law job; rather, it was a scientific effort to improve public order. How could you tell you have improved public order? Simple, by enhancing the eightfold dimensions of human dignity: power, wealth, skill, enlightenment, respect, affection, well-being, and rectitude. (It was originally sevenfold, but they added something along the way.)
The LSP “modality of analysis” had six dimensions, considering (i) who are the participants, (ii) what are their perspectives, (iii) where are the situations in which they interact, (iv) how many resources (or “bases of power”) do they have, (v) what are their strategies for using those resources, and (vi) after the use of those resources, what were the outcomes, effects and conditions.
And the analysis depended critically on which actors you regard as the population whose dignity is to be enhanced. Do you focus on the “effective elite” or multiple “elites,” or “rank-and-file”? Political insiders or outsiders? What occupations (legislator, executive, jurist, scholar)? And what personal identity factors, including culture/ethnicity/gender but also those affected by trauma from past harms or crises?
I couldn’t readily find definitions of other LSP terminology. “Modalities”? “Constitutive process of authoritative decision-making”? “Minimum World Public Order” compared with “Optimum World Public Order”?
Oh, well, back to researching public order in outer space. I’ll take the specific examples, circumstances and cases as I find them, one by one, and seek to exercise my humble legal judgments free of a single social-science theory!