alternatehistory.com

"Christopher Columbus Langdell (1826-1906) is arguably the most influential figure in the history of legal education in the United States, having shaped the modern law school by introducing a number of significant reforms during his tenure as dean of Harvard Law School (HLS) from 1870 to 1895. Langdell's innovations--including the admission requirement of a bachelor's degree, the graded and sequential curriculum, the hurdle of annual examinations for continuation and graduation, the independent career track for professional faculty, the transformation of the professional library from a textbook repository into a scholarly resource, and the inductive pedagogy of teaching from cases--became the characteristics gradually adopted by university law schools after 1890 and, eventually, schools of other professions. Langdell thus transformed legal education from an undemanding, gentlemanly acculturation into an academic meritocracy."
https://web.archive.org/web/2007041...ooperative.org/journals/lhr/22.2/kimball.html

"Learning to Think Like a Lawyer

"Christopher Columbus Langdell, the pioneer of the case method, attended Harvard Law School from 1851 to 1854--twice the usual term of study. He spent his extra time as a research assistant and librarian, holed up in the school's library reading legal decisions and developing an encyclopedic knowledge of court cases. Langdell's career as a trial lawyer was undistinguished; his primary skill was researching and writing briefs. In 1870, Harvard president Charles William Eliot appointed Langdell, who had impressed him during a chance meeting when they were both students, as professor and then dean of the law school. Langdell immediately set about
developing the case method.

"At the time, law was taught by the Dwight Method, a combination of lecture, recitation, and drill named after a professor at Columbia. Students prepared for class by reading "treatises," dense textbooks that interpreted the law and summarized the best thinking in the field. They were then tested--orally and in front of their peers--on their level of memorization and recall. Much of the real learning came later, during apprenticeships and on-the-job instruction.

"Langdell's approach was completely different. In his course on contracts, he insisted that students read only original sources--cases--and draw their own conclusions. To assist them, he assembled a set of cases and published them, with only a brief two-page introduction.

"Langdell's approach was much influenced by the then-prevailing inductive empiricism. He believed that lawyers, like scientists, worked with a deep understanding of a few core theories or principles; that understanding, in turn, was best developed via induction from a review of those appellate court decisions in which the principles first took tangible form. State laws might vary, but as long as lawyers understood the principles on which they were based, they should be able to practice anywhere. In Langdell's words: "To have a mastery of these [principles or doctrines] as to be able to apply them with consistent facility and certainty to the ever-tangled skein of human affairs, is what constitutes a true lawyer...."

"This view of the law shifted the locus of learning from law offices to the library. Craft skills and hands-on experience were far less important than a mastery of principles--the basis for deep, theoretical understanding. Of the library, Langdell observed, "It is to us all that the laboratories of the university are to the chemists and the physicists, the museum of natural history to the zoologists, the botanical garden to the botanists." And because "what qualifies a person...to teach law is not experience in the work of a lawyer's office...not experience in the trial or argument of cases...but experience in learning law," instruction was best left to scholars in law schools.

"This view of the law also required a new approach to pedagogy. Inducing general principles from a small selection of cases was a challenging task, and students were unlikely to succeed without help. To guide them, Langdell developed through trial and error what is now called the Socratic method: an interrogatory style in which instructors question students closely about the facts of the case, the points at issue, judicial reasoning, underlying doctrines and principles, and comparisons with other cases. Students prepare for class knowing that they will have to do more than simply parrot back material they have memorized from lectures or textbooks; they will have to present their own interpretations and analysis, and face detailed follow-up questions from the instructor.

"Langdell's innovations initially met with enormous resistance. Many students were outraged. During the first three years of his administration, as word spread of Harvard's new approach to legal education, enrollment at the school dropped from 165 to 117 students, leading Boston University to start a law school of its own. Alumni were in open revolt.

"With Eliot's backing, Langdell endured, remaining dean until 1895. By that time, the case method was firmly established at Harvard and six other law schools. Only in the late 1890s and early 1900s, as Chicago, Columbia, Yale, and other elite law schools warmed to the case method--and as Louis Brandeis and other successful Langdell students began to speak glowingly of their law-school experiences--id it diffuse more widely. By 1920, the case method had become the dominant form of legal education. It remains so today."

https://harvardmagazine.com/2003/09/making-the-case-html

So let's say that Langdell is not born or goes into some field other than law. Does the case method still become prevalent in American law schools? Langdell did not originate the case method: "John Norton Pomeroy, a professor of the University of New York City (now known as New York University), used a case method of instruction several years before Langdell introduced this method of instruction at Harvard."
https://www.nycourts.gov/ip/partnersinjustice/Clinical-Legal-Education.pdf But the influence of Harvard Law School has been so tremendous that viewing Langdell as father of the method still seems basically justified. One might be able to find isolated pre-Langdell examples of professors using it, but it hardly seems likely that they could have had anything like his influence.

Langdell and the case method have of course never lacked critics; Jerome Frank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Frank famously attacked Langdell as a "brilliant neurotic" who had created a system of legal education far removed from the needs of the practicing lawyer: "the neurotic escapist character of Langdell stamped itself on the educational programs of our leading law schools." https://web.archive.org/web/2007041...ooperative.org/journals/lhr/22.2/kimball.html (an article that reviews the history of Langdell's reputation, which has only partly recovered from the Legal Realists' "caricature").
Top