The
legal process school (sometimes "legal process theory") was a movement within American law that attempted to chart a third way between
legal formalism and
legal realism. Drawing its name from Hart & Sacks' textbook
The Legal Process (along with Hart & Wechsler's textbook The Federal Courts and the Federal System considered a primary canonical text of the school), it is associated with scholars such as
Herbert Wechsler,
Henry Hart, Albert Sacks and
Lon Fuller, and their students such as
John Hart Ely and
Alexander Bickel. The school grew in the 1950s and 1960s. To this day, the school's influence remains broad.