Hail! Langdell! |
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| Authors: | Paul D. Carrington |
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| Affiliation: | Chadwick Professor of Law, Duke University. This article is part of a project supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and by the E. T. Bost Fund of the Duke University School of Law. The author is grateful to George Christie, Martin Golding, Tom Grey, and Jeffrey O'Connell and to the reviewers for the journal for helpful suggestions on earlier drafts. Carrington is also grateful to the late Erwin Griswold, his teacher and friend for 40 years, who expressed with his accustomed gruffness a grudging approval of this work. Janet Sinder of the Duke University Law Library was especially helpful with the research. |
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| Abstract: | Christopher Columbus Langdell (whose career ended a century ago) achieved fame by devising the case method to turn law into a laboratory science divorced from politics and to make his course so rigorous that it would attract able students seeking to test and prove themselves with the severest academic challenge. The method was adapted by many law teachers who were unpersuaded by the idea of law as apolitical science. These included Langdell's colleagues, James Bradley Thayer and John Chipman Gray, who shared Holmes's disdain for the theory. The method survived and flourished despite its theoretical weakness because it worked in practice. No mere rite of passage, it developed numerous traits and skills useful to lawyers, it revealed a true picture of the political and atomized nature of American law, and it nurtured many of the civic virtues that American law teachers have sought to nurture since the time of George Wythe. |
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