Mcdougal, Myres S. (1906–1998)

Myres Smith McDougal, together with Harold Lasswell, founded the New Haven School (Policy Science School) of Jurisprudence. McDougal was a [Page 1006]brilliant scholar, a great teacher, and a role model to generations of students.

Born in Burtons, Mississippi, McDougal studied classics and law and taught classics for two years at the University of Mississippi. He became a Rhodes Scholar, studying law at St. John's College, Oxford University, where he was much influenced by legal historian Sir William Holdsworth (1871–1944) and by international jurist James Brierly (1881–1955). McDougal's achievement at Oxford was double firsts: a BA and a BCL. In 1931, he came to Yale Law School for a JSD, undergoing a conversion from a legal positivist to an American legal realist.

When McDougal joined the Yale law faculty in the mid-1930s, he mainly taught property law, which he called Land Use Planning. During World War II, he served as assistant general counsel in the Lend-Lease Administration and general counsel in the Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations. After his wartime experience, McDougal changed his focus to international law and jurisprudence. The McDougal-Lasswell team at Yale swung into action.

In the early 1960s, Yale University Press published McDougal's seminal studies in world public order, dealing with international law of war, oceans, outer space, interpretation of international agreements, and, much later, human rights. The American Society of International Law characterized the work of McDougal and his associates as “one of the most significant contributions of our time to international law … marked by boldness of imagination, originality and depth of insight, and scrupulous adherence to a comprehensive conceptual framework” (American Journal of International Law 1963, 57: 279). This conceptual framework is the New Haven School policy-oriented or policy-science approach, which has profoundly affected the field of international law. In the words of Judge Rosalyn Higgins of the International Court of Justice: “Beyond any question at all, Myres McDougal has been the greatest teacher of international law in the postwar world” (1999: 957).

McDougal's approach to law and policy is contextual, problem solving, and multimethod. It seeks to use law to help build a world community of human dignity by reference to relevant community and decision processes and by mobilizing and integrating all available intellectual skills for problem solving. Instead of rules and their logical interrelations, McDougal focused on claims and decisions, giving a balanced emphasis on perspectives (what people think and say) and operations (what people do) and emphasizing the imperative of policy choices and their value consequences. For each claim under study, McDougal characteristically wanted to clarify community goals, survey trends of past decision and practice, analyze conditioning factors, project likely patterns of future development, and invent and recommend alternatives for improvement. Human dignity values and relevant processes (community, authoritative decision, and effective power) were of paramount concern.

McDougal's wish to improve legal education was evident throughout his career, even during wartime. In 1943, he and Lasswell published their famous article, “Legal Education and Public Policy: Professional Training in the Public Interest.” It was a cogent call to transform legal education, urging the training of lawyers as servants and political leaders of the public interest rather than mere legal artisans. At Yale Law School, McDougal was able to put his ideals and ideas into practice: he ran its graduate program for twentyfive years, educating generations of students from all over the world and forging a global network of students, friends, colleagues, and leaders.

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