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Full-Text Articles in Law
Using The Master’S Tool To Dismantle His House: Derrick Bell, Herbert Wechsler, And Critical Legal Process, William Rhee
Using The Master’S Tool To Dismantle His House: Derrick Bell, Herbert Wechsler, And Critical Legal Process, William Rhee
Concordia Law Review
This Article retells the life stories of Derrick Bell, a founder of Critical Race Theory, and Herbert Wechsler, a founder of the Legal Process School, to suggest a synthesis of their often conflicting paradigms—Critical Legal Process. Critical Legal Process’s fundamental question is whether the Master’s tool, the so-called rule of law, can be considered—in the words of Wechsler’s most famous article—a genuine “neutral principle.” Can the Master’s favorite tool be repurposed to dismantle the very house it built? Can the same rule of law that was abused to build the racist Jim Crow system not only dismantle that explicitly racist …
The Anti-Case Method: Herbert Wechsler And The Political History Of The Criminal Law Course, Anders Walker
The Anti-Case Method: Herbert Wechsler And The Political History Of The Criminal Law Course, Anders Walker
All Faculty Scholarship
This article is the first to recover the dramatic transformation in criminal law teaching away from the case method and towards a more open-ended philosophical approach in the 1930s. It makes three contributions. One, it shows how Columbia Law Professor Herbert Wechsler revolutionized the teaching of criminal law by de-emphasizing cases and including a variety of non-case related material in his 1940 text Criminal Law and Its Administration. Two, it reveals that at least part of Wechsler's intention behind transforming criminal law teaching was to undermine Langdell's case method, which he blamed for producing a "closed-system" view of the law …