Summary
Sociological jurisprudence, as Lahav presents it: the theory that law is not a pure science but is grounded in culture and society — legal rules reflect social and historical forces, must be understood in context, and can and should change to meet new challenges — against legal formalism’s closed system, in the pre-New Deal American rivalry to which Simon Agranat was exposed at the University of Chicago and which structured his judging (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 150-170, 505-540).
Details
- At Chicago the case method of James Parker Hall met Ernst Freund’s rival approach — law integrated into liberal education, taught by lecture, with balancing of interests as an essential tool; Agranat pointed to Freund as the professor who influenced him most, and to Cardozo’s The Nature of the Judicial Process as his most exciting student reading (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 510-540).
- Agranat later called the rivalry “the closed and the open systems of law”; his brethren on Israel’s Supreme Court were, in Lahav’s presentation, mostly staunch formalists, and the contest between the cultures is a main thread of Israeli legal culture’s formation (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 155-175, 520-535).
- Kol ha-Am vindicated sociological jurisprudence in Lahav’s reading: law recognised as a social system and judging as an enterprise engaged in balancing political interests, rejecting legal formalism and rigid positivism (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1340-1365).
Related pages
Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Simon Agranat, Kol Ha’am Case