Christopher Columbus Langdell and the Case Method

The upper levels of the educational hierarchy dominated AALS and shaped the course of legal education. Trends were set from the top down, and none was more important than the introduction in the 1870s of the casebook method at Harvard Law School. The traditional method of legal education, though varying from place to place, demanded that students memorize assigned portions of a text and then repeat that material when quizzed by the instructor. Students were not, as a rule, required to have any college education, and the course of instruction varied from a few months to a year or two. Methods were dogmatic, even among the best instructors.

Christopher Columbus Langdell, who served as dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1895, introduced radical reforms that altered the course of legal education. His changes met with often considerable resistance. Students and faculty protested--the former often by refusing to attend class--and some of the reforms did not take firm

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hold until after Langdell left the deanship a quarter-century later. Yet, Langdell left a lasting mark; in its broad outlines, his scheme continues to dominate legal education today.

The new dean tightened admissions standards by requiring students without a college degree to take an admissions test. Langdell lengthened the period of law training from one to three years and devised courses appropriate for students in each year of their work. He also introduced final examinations that students had to pass at the end of each year in order to move to the curriculum of the next year and ultimately graduation.

These reforms were a prelude to Langdell's most important change, which was the case method of instruction. Casebooks were nothing new; the first had been prepared in 1810. They were collections of actual cases on a given subject that were arranged in such a way as to show the principles of the law and how they had developed. John Norton Pomeroy at New York University Law School in the 1860s had used the casebook and with it the case method. The latter simply meant that instead of lecturing to the students, the professor led them through a process of inquiry into the cases. Each case became an example of a real-life experience from which the students could learn.

Langdell shifted the emphasis in the case method, however. He moved it away from a tool for vocational training and into a means of developing a scientific approach to the law. The object of the law department at Harvard under Langdell was "not precisely and only to educate young men to be practicing lawyers, though it [was] largely used for that purpose. It [was] to furnish all students who desire it the same facilities to investigate the science of human law, theoretically, historically, and thoroughly as they have to investigate mathematics, natural sciences, or any other branch of thought." ²² Langdell blended science with law in the service of the emerging industrial nation. Langdell's approach to legal studies was based on his insight that in order best to serve their corporate and nationally oriented clients, lawyers had to be more skilled in the process of legal thinking and in brief preparation than in the technical vocational skills that were invaluable to the solo practitioner.

Langdell in 1871 published the first casebook on contracts, and he used it extensively in his classes. It consisted mostly of English decisions, underscoring Langdell's belief that the system of law in the United States needed to return to its English roots and to emphasize a more formal approach to the study and implementation of law.

This new scheme placed new demands on law teachers. Previously, they had been practitioners, valued for their practical knowledge and firsthand experience. Langdell, however, sought out new Harvard graduates already trained in the casebook method and sympathetic to the concept of legal science. The role of the law professor was to teach basic principles and leave the application of the law to later experience. Law schools became truly professional schools. They were scientific laboratories in which students and teachers were engaged in a quest for the enduring truths of the law through rigorous analysis of a selected body of cases from which could be adduced enduring legal principles.

By 1920, Langdell's system became the model for legal education throughout the nation. Few educational reforms have enjoyed such rapid and complete acceptance, and Harvard graduates accepted positions at other important law schools around the country, spreading Langdell's message. As a result, the structure and content of legal education on the national level took on an important degree of uniformity. The familiar

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modern law school emerged: formal entrance requirements, the case method of teaching, course organization built around certain core subjects, large libraries filled with state and national reporters, and law reviews edited by law students who practiced their craft as junior scientists of the law.

Langdell's revolution in legal education succeeded because it presented the law as a science, as an enterprise distinct from its old nemesis of politics, and equal in weight to the other emerging disciplines of the social sciences. The law, according to Langdell, was not just a vocation (something tawdry that craftsmen practiced) but a genuine branch of higher learning that required rigorous formal training. It was, in a word, a profession, and a scientific one at that. The approach nicely complemented the search being undertaken by bar associations, especially the ABA, to find a professional basis for the law, and it also well served emerging corporate capitalism.

But the new science of the law was really no science at all. Langdell's model "o f science was not experimental, or experiential; his model was Euclid's geometry, not physics or biology." ²³ Langdell endorsed empirical research but limited its scope to law reports--that is, reported cases. Even those cases were limited, and Langdell, in his own subject speciality of contracts, spent much time uncovering the principal cases that settled conclusively particular legal problems. The life of the law was logic, and a dry logic at that. The new scheme gave the law schools a position of scholarly equality in universities, something that Langdell believed was essential to the success of law education; but it was also segregationist in that none could enter its practice save those who had trained in it. The law school was part of the university world and the flood tide of scientific inquiry that was sweeping over it, without being in that same world.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1237