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Langdell's Auto-da-fé

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Extract

As one who has suggested in print that Christopher Columbus Langdell was a loony, I am singularly pleased that Bruce Kimball has so carefully demonstrated that Kit was a regular guy just trying to teach his classes and learn some law. But this observation seems to me to be not particularly relevant to the debate about Langdell that I have mostly watched, but occasionally commented on. I shall try to recreate that debate as best I can, to show where it stands, and so, to identify where an understanding of Langdell's teaching places us.

Type
Forum: Comment
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1999

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References

1. American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 25Google Scholar.

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14. Ibid., 82.

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18. Ibid., 26.

19. “The ‘Science’ of Legal Science: The Model of the Natural Sciences in Nineteenth-Century American Legal Education.”

20. “Christopher C. Langdell, Annual Report on the Law School,” in Annual Report of the President and Treasurer of Harvard College, 1890-91 (Cambridge: Harvard College, 1891): 104, 166.Google Scholar

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22. Ibid.