Langdell, Christopher Columbus (1826-1906)

Christopher Columbus Langdell (1826-1906)

Law professor

Sources

Background. Christopher Columbus Langdell was born on a farm in New Boston, New Hampshire, in 1826. He went to work in the textile mills of Manchester, New Hampshire, then worked his way through Exeter Academy before entering Harvard at the age of twenty-two. He left Harvard without a degree, returned to Exeter to read law, and then at the age of twenty-five entered Harvard Law School. Langdell stayed at the law school for three years, twice as long as most law students at the time. He supported himself by working in the college library and doing occasional editorial work for professors. After graduating in 1853, he practiced law in New York for sixteen years before returning to Harvard in 1870 as Dane Professor of Law and dean of the law school.

Changing the Law School. Langdell changed the law school and the role of the dean. He saw the dean as a leader, not just an administrator. Langdell raised the standards for admission to the law school, requiring prospective students to translate a long passage of Latin (without a dictionary) and answer questions drawn from Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769). At the end of the first year students were examined to determine if they could continue. In 1871 Harvard extended from eighteen months to two years the course of study to earn a law degree and by 1899 required three years to complete a degree. Langdell also began to draw on legal scholars rather than lawyers to teach in the school, creating the idea of a law professor as someone who taught, rather than practiced, law. James Barr Ames, appointed to teach at Harvard in 1873, was the first of these academic lawyers. University administrators were reluctant at first to accept the appointments, wanting instead to find practicing attorneys to teach law. However, Langdell and Harvard president Charles Eliot, wanted the law school to train not only lawyers, but prospective law teachers. By 1895, when Ames succeeded Langdell as dean, Harvard graduates were teaching at influential law schools across the country.

The Case Method. Under Langdell’s supervision the law courses at Harvard did not require memorization of facts, but the ability to reason and think. In 1870 Langdell introduced the case method of teaching. Instead of professors lecturing on abstract principles of law, students would read collections of cases and court decisions and from them gather the underlying principles. Roscoe Pound, later dean of the law school himself, recalled, “Langdell was always worried about ‘Why?’ and ‘How? He didn’t care particularly whether you knew a rule or could state the rule or not, but how did the court do this, and why did it do it?” Pound recalled that Langdell’s class on equity pleading bored him at times, but that when he went back to Nebraska to practice law he looked over his notes from the course and discovered he “knew an awful lot about it.”

Challenges to the Case Method. Not all lawyers or law schools readily embraced the case method. In 1891 the American Bar Association’s Committee on Legal Education’s Committee on Legal Education attacked the case method for not teaching lawyers the law. The case method, the ABA committee warned, was producing lawyers too eager to litigate, too willing to support clients in bad cases, able to cite opinions without fully comprehending underlying ideas of justice, and, like eager college students, leaving it to the judge to make a ruling. Lawyers, the ABA argued, should know the rules and should try to resolve questions before they came to court. In 1892 the ABA further attacked the case method. “The result of this elaborate study of actual disputes, . . . ignoring . . . the settled doctrines that have grown out of past ones, is a class of graduates admirably calculated to argue any side of any controversy, . . . but quite unable to advise a client when he is safe from litigation.” Trained in the case method, the lawyer saw himself as a “hired gladiator” ready to argue any case.

Success of the Case Method. By the time Langdell retired in 1895, the case method was established not only at Harvard, but at Northwestern, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Cincinnati, where dean and future U.S. president William Howard Taft reorganized the law school. In the early twentieth century some law schools still rejected the case method as being too unconventional. However, by the 1940s virtually every law school in the country followed the case method.

Sources

James Barr Ames, “Christopher Columbus Langdell,” in Great American Lawyers, edited by William Draper Lewis (Philadelphia: Winston, 1909);

Arthur E. Sutherland, The Law at Harvard: A History of Men and Ideas, 1817–1967 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).