Legal Process Theory, a process-focused jurisprudential frame-work that predominated in the American legal academy in the 1950s with lasting influence on American constitutional development, has for decades since been depicted as a complacent and relativistic jurisprudence, designed to evade controversial value judgments by seeking substantively neutral determinacy in matters of process. I upend this wrongful narrative by recovering the inspiration that Legal Process thinkers took from John Dewey’s democratizing approach to pragmatism, and in particular, from Dewey’s commitments to the interconnection of fact and value and the moral productivity of deliberative and collaborative processes. I argue that Dewey’s rightful influence on Legal Process Theory has been obscured by prominent left-leaning academic accounts that erroneously attribute to him value relativism and a depoliticizing relativist theory of democracy, which Legal Process thinkers supposedly repurposed for the legal domain. But Dewey re-jected ethical and intellectual relativism; he also rejected absolutism. I argue that the Legal Process thinker Lon Fuller followed Dewey’s democratizing pathway through these extremes and adapted it to legal theory. I further connect Fuller’s Deweyan jurisprudence to the canonical mid-century Legal Process text written by Henry Hart and Albert Sacks, and to the legal pragmatism espoused by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Following Dewey, Legal Process thinkers mounted a compelling and synthetic yet underappreciated response to the difficult questions raised by Legal Realism about moral and legal relativism and the relationship between judicial and democratic decision making.
