Henry Melvin Hart Jr. (19041969) was an American legal scholar. He was an influential member of the Harvard Law School faculty from 1932 until his death in 1969.
Early life and career
Born in Butte, Montana, Hart received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1926 and attended Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review and received an LL.M. in 1930 and an S.J.D. in 1931. Following work for then-Professor Felix Frankfurter, Hart clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and then returned to Harvard Law School, where he was a fixture until his death at 64. An "ardent supporter of the New Deal" and of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, World War II and the Cold War led Hart to evolve "from a dedicated progressive into a theorist of social stability, cultural consensus, and institutional balance." That evolution led Hart to seek institutional solutions to protect the rule of law from overreaching by Congress and the executive. That approach became the inspiration for the new "Legal Process" school of American jurisprudence.
Important works and key principles
The legal process
The legal process school was first given definition by Hart's manuscript of the same name, co-authored with Albert M. Sacks. Originally planned for publication by Foundation Press in 1956, the manuscript was organized into seven chapters, with 55 "problems" which guided the student through Hart and Sacks proposed approach to important American law cases. Despite being widely circulated in manuscript form, which itself went through four major editions, the Legal Process was not published in book form by Foundation Press until 1994. The manuscript editions, however, were widely circulated and very influential among the professoriate, many of whom used it as the foundation for courses at Harvard Law and other institutions.
Together with The Federal Courts, discussed below, The Legal Process within twenty years came to be viewed as "the foundation text of the legal theory known as 'legal process.'" An exploration of law made both by courts and outside the courtroom, scholars have identified three key themes from the work itself: (1) Institutional competence, (2) Statutory interpretation, and (3) principled decisionmaking.
Institutional competence
"This perspective stresses that Hart and Sacks 'believed that it was possible to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate exercises of official power while simultaneously transcending the centuries-old debate between ... the 'is' and the 'ought'.' The Legal Process demonstrated that lawyers did not have to engage in substantive moral or political reasoning, since 'there could be a kind of natural, functional correlation between different kinds of disputes and different kinds of institutions, so that the categories of dispute could be matched up with the kinds of institutional procedures corresponding to them.' Thus, by adopting the value pluralism of pragmatists like John Dewey, legal process was able to argue - contra the realists - that the analysis of legal validity is not reducible to political ideology."
Statutory interpretation
Hart and Sacks argued for a shift away from the application of substantive, precedential rules, critiqued by the realists, in favor of application of rules of precedential process. "Granting that substantive fairness is a matter of ideology, the doctrinal approach holds that fairness will result, regardless or even in spite of the judges' biases, if methods of judging which all concede to be fair are followed scrupulously." Hart and Sacks "believed that judges should use various tools of construction -- including the overall policy evinced by the statutory text, the legislative history, and public knowledge . . . -- to determine what 'purpose ought to be attributed to the statute' and to interpret the words 'to carry out the purpose as best it can.'" These procedural rules become a way to distinguish between adjudication and ad hoc legislation, the first of which is the role of the courts. "This view of statutes depended critically on the presumption that procedures existed that could identify the purposes selected by the legislature without actually substantively evaluating those purposes." In their famous phrase, judges "should assume, unless the contrary unmistakably appears, that the legislature was made up of reasonable persons pursuing reasonable purposes reasonably."