[2][3] 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.
"[5] That evolution led Hart to seek institutional solutions to protect the rule of law from overreaching by Congress and the executive.
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.
'"[7] An exploration of law made both by courts and outside the courtroom,[8] scholars have identified three key themes from the work itself: (1) Institutional competence, (2) Statutory interpretation, and (3) principled decisionmaking.
[9] "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'.'
"[11] 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 .
"[14] One of the key tenets of Hart's thought was "principled decisionmaking," or the idea that "decisions [must] be based on premises of general applicability, otherwise they would be ad hoc or 'legislative'" and that the adjudication must be neutral, "thereby claiming the allegiance of litigants through a tacit arrangement of reciprocity...."[15] Heavily influenced by Justice Benjamin Cardozo's approach to adjudication,[16] "principled" decisionmaking thus transcends the immediate outcome of the case at the bar,[17] and through appeal to neutral adjudication principles, "thereby claim[s] the allegiance of litigants through a tacit arrangement of reciprocity.
"[18] Principled decisionmaking as an idea would later be fleshed out more fully by Wechsler,[19] in Judge Learned Hand's criticism of the activist Warren Court,[20] and which remains an important and debated concept in modern jurisprudence.
The question what is or ought to be the substantive law governing citizen behavior in a given area is no longer the sole, or even the dominant, object of legal analysis.
"[27] Hart and Wechsler's initial response was that, if there may be widespread disagreement on what the substantive law is, or ought to be, in a given field, there may at least be agreement as to where institutionally those decisions should be made, and under what conditions or set of rules (such as jurisdiction, procedure, etc.).
Hart/ [Ronald]Dworkin debate, entails a view about the institutional allocation of power remarkably close to the one articulated by (Henry) Hart and Sacks in the Legal Process.
[39] Another analysis points to a separate split in the legal process school between the legal process approach outlined by Hart and Sacks and a later iteration, "defined by Herbert Wechsler, Alexander Bickel, and Robert Bork" which changed "Hart and Sacks's theory of law into a conservative theory of adjudication.
[41] Amar points to the large number of articles published in the early 1950s at Columbia and Harvard on the topic of federal jurisprudence, as well as the large numbers of "student editors on the editorial boards [at these schools] who went on to become teachers of federal jurisdiction, legal process, and constitutional law" as an important indicia of the influence and "intellectual leadership" Hart and Wechsler had on their respective institutions and, by extension, on American jurisprudence.