The years from 1790 to 1920 saw the transformation of American society from an agrarian republic of 4 million people huddled on the Atlantic seaboard to a continental nation of some 105 million people, recognized as the dominant financial and industrial power in the world. Legal education (and legal culture generally) responded to and reflected the historical forces behind this radical transformation. In 1790, aspiring lawyers learned law and gained admission to practice by apprenticing themselves to practicing lawyers. Law office law unavoidably tended to be local law. By 1920, 143 law schools (most affiliated with universities) dominated – indeed, all but monopolized – legal education and were close to controlling entry into the profession. Through their trade group, the Association of American Law Schools, and with the support of the American Bar Association, they had by the beginning of the 1920s created the institutional mechanisms for defining, if not fully implementing, national standards for legal education. In legal education as in many other areas of American society, institutionalization and organization were the keys to power, and power increasingly flowed from the top down.

The normative assumptions of this new educational regime emanated from the reforms first introduced by Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard Law School in 1870. Langdell’s ideas were stoutly resisted, initially even at Harvard. They were never implemented anywhere else in pure form, and they were rooted more deeply in tradition than Langdell acknowledged. Nevertheless, his institutional and pedagogic innovations became the common denominator of modern legal education.