FROM REALISM TO PLURALISM: THEORY AND EDUCATION AT YALE LAW SCHOOL, 1927-1960. (VOLUMES ONE AND TWO) (CONNECTICUT)

The dissertation examines the impact of legal history upon legal education at Harvard and Yale Law Schools between 1927 and 1960. It demonstrates that legal realism began at Yale as a revolt against Harvardian conceptualism. The realists criticized Harvardians' attempts to reduce law to an autonomous system of rules and principles. They endorsed the functional approach, which stressed the factual context of a case, rather than the legal principles it raised, and the attempt to address issues of social policy by integrating law with the social sciences. The dissertation shows that the realists failed in their attempts to change legal education during the twenties and thirties. Although Yale catalogues suggested that the realists were revolutionizing legal education, the casebooks and examinations that they prepared remained traditional. Further, intellectual change at Yale depended upon institutional chance. The Depression and other factors undermined realism. The dissertation suggests that Yale did not become a "realistic" law school until the late forties, when Yale law professors began organizing their casebooks along functional lines, and integrating law with the social sciences and social policy in their casebooks and in the many new courses on public and international law. It shows that the conservatism of the university administration prevented the law school from going further. Yet through its analysis of the reactions of Yale law professors to more radical programs presented by some of their colleagues, it also suggests that most Yale law professors refused to go further. It indicates that after a dispute between the faculty and the university administration in the mid-fifties, the law school moved from realism towards pluralism by appointing Harvard men to its faculty who distrusted realism and by lessening its emphasis on the social sciences. The dissertation examines two curriculum committee reports at Harvard Law School and concludes that Harvard Law School became more hospitable towards realism and moved from conceptualism towards pluralism during this same period. It shows that the two schools were intellectually indistinguishable by 1960. It concludes that legal realism did affect legal education, but that legal realism was not the radical movement it originally seemed to be.