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Langdell Laughs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

William P. LaPiana
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Extract

The amount of ink spilled in consideration of the life, thought, accomplishments, and legacy of Christopher Columbus Langdell is eloquent testimony to the critical role he plays in the self-image of the American law teaching profession. It is both wonderful and astounding, therefore, to find that critical primary sources remained unread and unused at the very end of the twentieth century. Now that Bruce Kimball has brought them to light, we have a more complete view of the man and his thought, one that, not surprisingly, reveals to us someone quite different from the cruelly and crudely caricatured inventor of those twin devices for stifling young minds, the case and Socratic methods.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , Spring 1999 , pp. 141 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1999

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References

1. Page references in parentheses are to Kimball, Bruce A., “Warn Students That I Entertain Heretical Opinions,” Law and History Review 17 (1999): 57–140CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. LaPiana, William P., “Thoughts and Lives,” New York Law School Law Review 39 (1994): 630–35.Google Scholar

3. See, e.g., Ames, James Barr, “The Negotiable Instruments Law—Necessary Amendments,” Harvard Law Review 16 (1903): 255–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar and especially footnote 1 detailing the involved controversy over the provisions of the uniform negotiable instruments law in which Ames played an important role.

4. Lewis, William Draper, “The Uniform Partnership Act,” Yale Law Journal 24 (1915): 639.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the controversy surrounding the Act, see Crane, Judson A., “The Uniform Partner-ship Act—A Criticism,” Harvard Law Review 28 (1915): 762–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewis, William Draper,“The Uniform Partnership Act—A Reply to Mr. Crane's Criticism,” Harvard Law Review 29 (1915): 158–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 29 (1916): 291-313; Crane, Judson A., “The Uniform Partnership Act and Legal Persons,” Harvard Law Review 29 (1916): 838–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Much of the discussion in these articles involves analysis of cases to determine on which view of partnership they proceed.

5. James Bradley Thayer, Memorandum Book B, January 1874, Harvard Law School Library, reprinted in Howe, Mark DeWolfe, “The first Law School Lecture of James Bradley Thayer, Preliminary Note,” Journal of Legal Education 2 (1949): 2Google Scholar.

6. Swasey, George, “Boston University Law School,” Green Bag 1 (1889): 55.Google Scholar

7. Washburn, Emory, Sketches of the Judicial History of Massachusetts from 1630 to the Revolution in 1773 (Boston, 1849; reprt. New York, 1974), 190Google Scholar; Nelson, William E., Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760-1830 (Cambridge, 1975), 201, n. 73Google Scholar. On the practice of suing on book accounts in colonial Connecticut, see Mann, Bruce H., “Rationality, Legal Change, and Community in Connecticut, 1690-1760,” Law and Society Review 14 (1980): 187–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Langdell, C. C., “Brief Survey of Equity Jurisdiction, Part IV,” Harvard Law Review 2 (1889): 256CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Compare Ames's treatment of the same subject, Ames, J. B., “The History of the Assumpsit. II—Implied Assumpsit,” Harvard Law Review 2 (1888): 66–69Google Scholar where the growing use of assumpsit is celebrated as an illustration “of the flexibility and power of self-development of the Common Law.” On the influence of Ames's scholarship in this area, see Baker, J. H., An Introduction to English Legal History (3d ed.; London, 1990), 424–25Google Scholar.

9. Langdell, C. C., “The Northern Securities Case and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act,” Harvard Law Review 16 (1903): 539–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. At least one student of the subject believed that Langdell's theory “that equity is only a system of remedies” led to pernicious results. Huston, Charles Andrew, The Enforcement of Decrees in Equity; Harvard Studies in Jurisprudence (Cambridge, 1915), 1:152Google Scholar.

11. For example: Grey, Thomas, “Langdell's Orthodoxy,” University of Pittsburgh Law Review 45 (1983): 1–53Google Scholar; Schlegel, John Henry, “Langdell's Legacy Or, The Case of the Empty Envelope,” Stanford Law Review 36 (1984): 1517–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; LaPiana, William P., Logic and Experience: The Origin of Modern American Legal Education (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Duxbury, Neil, Patterns of American Jurisprudence (Oxford, 1995), 10–25Google Scholar; Carrington, Paul D., “Hail! Langdell!” Law & Social Inquiry 20 (1995): 691–764CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the Commentaries by William P. LaPiana, John Henry Schlegel, and Laura Kalman, ibid., 761-73.