Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T11:49:09.620Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Principle, Politics, and Finances of Introducing Academic Merit as the Standard of Hiring for “the teaching of law as a career,” 1870–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Bruce A. Kimball
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Compared to the practice in other professional schools and academic fields at universities, law professors are hired at a young age based primarily upon their academic merit determined through grades, class rank, and school rank. This emphasis upon narrowly defined academic merit—apart from achievement demonstrated through original scholarship or experience in professional practice—first emerged during “the professionalization of the American law professor” between 1870 and 1900 at Harvard Law School (HLS). Though normative today, this outcome was neither necessary nor uncontested. In the late nineteenth century the new standard of hiring faculty according to their academic merit was energetically opposed by those favoring the antecedent standard of professional experience and reputation. Only when financial considerations counterbalanced that traditional standard did hiring decisions tip in favor of the new principle. Not until the early 1900s, when the second generation of academic meritocrats dominated the HLS faculty, did the new hiring standard become unequivocally established as policy in the school and, by extension, in legal education.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , Summer 2006 , pp. 617 - 648
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2006 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, John Q., to Thayer, James B. 9 Jan. 1883. Thayer Papers. Box 27, f. 15.Google Scholar
Ames, James Barr, to Eliot, Charles W. 10 Mar. 1890. Eliot Papers. Box 78.Google Scholar
Ames, James Barr. to Eliot, Charles W. 28 Sept. 1890. Eliot Papers. Box 78.Google Scholar
Ames, James Barr. to Eliot, Charles W. and Fellows of College, Harvard. 6 June 1898. Eliot Papers. Box 92/268–269.Google Scholar
Ames, James Barr. 1901. The Vocation of the Law Professor. In Lectures on Legal History and Miscellaneous Legal Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar
Ames, James Barr. to Eliot, Charles W. 8 Feb. 1903. Eliot Papers. Box 100.Google Scholar
Ames, James Barr. to Eliot, Charles W. 20 July 1903. Eliot Papers. Box 100.Google Scholar
Ames, James Barr. to Eliot, Charles W. 7 Aug. 1903. Eliot Papers. Box 100.Google Scholar
Ames, James Barr. 1909. Christopher Columbus Langdell, 1826–1906. In Great American Lawyers, ed. Lewis, William D., vol. 8, 465–89. Philadelphia: John C. Wilson.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Jerold S. 1976. Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
Beale, Joseph. 1921. Jeremiah Smith. Harvard Law Review 35:1–8.Google Scholar
Bradley, Charles S., to Eliot, Charles W. 2 June 1870. Eliot Papers. Box 66.Google Scholar
Bradley, Charles S. to Eliot, Charles W. 12 July 1870. Eliot Papers. Box 66.Google Scholar
Bradley, Charles S. to Eliot, Charles W. 28 Apr. 1871. Eliot Papers. Box 67.Google Scholar
Bradley, Charles S. to Eliot, Charles W. 2 Oct. 1872. Eliot Papers. Box 67.Google Scholar
Bradley, Charles S. to Thayer, James B. 9 Dec. 1873. Thayer Papers. Box 20, f. 1.Google Scholar
Bradley, Charles S. to Eliot, Charles W. 27 June 1876. Eliot Papers. Box 69.Google Scholar
Brandeis, Louis D., toBrandeis, Adolph. 30 May 1883. In Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, 1971, ed. Urofsky, Melvin I. and Levy, David W., vol.1, 65–66. Albany: State University of New York Press. Google Scholar
Brannan, Joseph D, toThayer, James B. 3 June 1897. Thayer Papers. Box 17, f. 2.Google Scholar
Buck, Paul H., ed. 1965. Social Sciences at Harvard 1860–1920: From Inculcation to the Open Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar
Davis, William T. 1895. Bench and Bar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Boston: Boston History Co. Google Scholar
Carter, James C., toEliot, Charles W. 20 Dec. 1869. Eliot Papers. Box 66.Google Scholar
Carter, W. Burlette. 1997. Reconstructing Langdell. Georgia Law Review 32:1–139.Google Scholar
Centennial History of the Harvard Law School, 1817–1917. 1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Law School Assoc.Google Scholar
Clark, James F. 1999. The Harvard Law School Deanship of Roscoe Pound, 1916–1936. Harvard Law School, Third-year Paper. Harvard Law School Library.Google Scholar
Coquillette, Daniel R., Hamilton, Daniel, and Basile, Mary Elizabeth. 2003. Interviews conducted with deans of selected law schools in fall 2002. Typescripts on file with Modern Legal Pedagogy Project, Harvard Law School. Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Cosgrove, Richard A. 1987. Our Lady the Common Law: An Anglo-American Legal Community, 1870–1930. New York: New York University Press. Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. 18—. Annual Report of the President and Treasurer of Harvard College, 18—. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Gilman. 23 Mar. 1876. Daniel Coit Gilman Papers, Johns Hopkins University Library, Special Collections, Ms. 1.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Charles F. Dunbar. 11 Jan. 1883. Charles F. Dunbar Correspondence. Harvard University Archives. f. “Charles W. Eliot.”Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. 1886. Oration. In Harvard Law School Association, Report of the Organization and of the First general Meeting, 1886, 60–63. Boston: Harvard Law School Association. Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Williston, Samuel. 23 Apr. 1890. Eliot Papers. Box 90, letterbook, 7a−8.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Langdell, C. C. [1892?] Eliot Papers. Shorthand box 305, book 23/92, leaf 14.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Wambaugh, Eugene. [May 1892?]. Eliot Papers. Shorthand box 305, book 23/92.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Brandeis, Louis D. [1893?]. Eliot Papers. Shorthand box 306, book 17–19/93.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Langdell, C. C. [1894?]. Eliot Papers. Shorthand box 310, book 30–25/94.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. 1895. [Address]. In Report of the Ninth Annual Meeting [of the Harvard Law School Association]… in especial Honor of Christopher Columbus Langdell 69–73. Boston: Harvard Law School Association. Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Lee, Blewett. 13 Mar. 1897. Eliot Papers. Box 91, letterbook 167a−168.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Strobel, Edward H. 19 May 1898. Eliot Papers. Box 92, letterbook, 9.Google Scholar
. to Ames, James Barr. [June 1898?]. Eliot Papers. Shorthand box 317, legal pad 8/98–20.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Prescott, Oliver. 11 Apr. 1902. Eliot Papers. Box 92. letterbook, 156.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Smith, Jeremiah. 5 Jan. 1907. Eliot Papers. Box 96, letterbook, 7–8.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Pritchett, Henry S. 13 Apr. 1915. Correspondence of Charles W. Eliot. Harvard Law School Library, Special Collections.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. 1920. Langdell and the Law School. Harvard Law Review 33: 518–25.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Lane, William C. 2 Oct. 1922. Eliot Papers. Box 68, f. 1874 A–G.Google Scholar
Eliot, Charles W. Papers. to Holmes, Oliver W., Jr. 28 Mar. 1924. In Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Papers, Harvard Law School Library, microfilm version, reel 31.Google Scholar
Fessenden, Franklin G. 1920. Rebirth of the Harvard Law School. Harvard Law Review 33:493–517.Google Scholar
Frank, Jerome. 1947. A Plea for Lawyer-Schools. Yale Law Journal 56:1303–44.Google Scholar
Frankfurter, Felix. 1943. Joseph Henry Beale. Harvard Law Review 56:701–03.Google Scholar
Gawalt, Gerard W. 1984. The Impact of Industrialization on the Legal Profession in Massachusetts, 1870–1900. In The New High Priests: Lawyers in Post-Civil War America, ed. Gawalt, Gerard W., 97–123. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Google Scholar
Grant, Robert. 1895. The Art of Living. Scribner's Magazine 17:3–15, 615–27, 760.Google Scholar
Gray, John C., toEliot, Charles W. 28 Dec. 1882. Eliot Papers. Box 70.Google Scholar
Gray, John C. to Eliot, Charles W. 3 Jan. 1883. Eliot Papers. Box 71.Google Scholar
Gray, John C. to Thayer, James B. 14 Aug. 1890. Thayer Papers. Box 27.Google Scholar
Gurney, Ephraim W., to Eliot, Charles W.[3 Jan. 1883?]. Eliot Papers. Box 71.Google Scholar
“Professor E. W. Gurney” 13 Sept. 1886. Boston Evening Transcript 1.Google Scholar
Hall, James P. 1909. James Bradley Thayer. In Great American Lawyers, ed. Lewis, William D., vol. 8, 345–84. Philadelphia: John C. Winston.Google Scholar
Harvard Law School. 18—. Grade records: Book of Marks. Harvard University Archives. 69 vols., numbered 0–68.Google Scholar
Harvard Law School. 1882. Annual Catalog, 1882–83.Google Scholar
Harvard Law School Faculty. 2 Jan. 1883. Faculty Minutes. Harvard Law School Library, Special Collections.Google Scholar
Harvard Law School Faculty. June 1898. Record of the [HLS] Faculty voting on the appointment of Mr. Brannan. Eliot Papers. Box 92/268–269.Google Scholar
Harvard University. Corporation Records. Harvard University Archives.Google Scholar
Harvard University. 15 June 1883. Board of Overseers Minutes. Harvard University Archives. academical series II, vol. 3, 244.Google Scholar
Harvard University. 9 Jan. 1884. Board of Overseers Visiting Committee to the Law School Report, 1882–83. Harvard University Archives, academical series II, vol. 3.Google Scholar
Haskell, Thomas L. 1977. The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Google Scholar
Holmes, Nathaniel. [1900? ]. Judge Holmes Journal: A Genealogy of the Holmes Family of Londonderry, N.H. c.1900. Transcribed by Hedrick, Marie. Typescript privately printed. Peterborough, New Hampshire, Public Library.Google Scholar
Holmes, Nathaniel. Papers. Harvard Law School Library, Special Collections.Google Scholar
Holmes, Jr., Oliver, W., to Eliot, Charles W. 1 Nov. 1881. Eliot Papers. Box 70.Google Scholar
Holmes, Jr., Oliver, W. to Eliot, Charles W. 18 Nov. 1881. Eliot Papers. Box 70.Google Scholar
Holmes, Jr., Oliver, W. 1880. [Review of] A Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts with a Summary . . . by Langdell, C. C.… 1879. American Law Review 14: 233–35.Google Scholar
Hook, Jay. 1993. A Brief Life of James Bradley Thayer. Northwestern University Law Review 88:1–8.Google Scholar
Howe, Mark DeWolfe. 1963. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, vol. 2: The Proving Years, 1870–1882. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar
Hurst, James W. 1950. The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers. Boston: Little, Brown. Google Scholar
Johnson, William R. 1978. Schooled Lawyers: A Study in the Clash of Professional Cultures. New York: New York University Press. Google Scholar
Keener, William A., toEliot, Charles W. 28 Dec. 1882. Eliot Papers. Box 70.Google Scholar
Keener, William A. to Eliot, Charles W. 11 Jan. 1883. Eliot Papers. Box 71.Google Scholar
Kimball, Bruce A. Forthcoming. Langdell on Contracts and Legal Reasoning: Revising the Holmesian Caricature. Law & History Review.Google Scholar
Kimball, Bruce A. 1992. The “True Professional Ideal” in America: A History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Google Scholar
Kimball, Bruce A. 2002. Young Christopher Langdell: The Formation of an Educational Reformer, 1826–1854. Journal of Legal Education 52:189–239.Google Scholar
Kimball, Bruce A. and Brown, R. Blake. 2004. “The Highest Legal Ability in the Nation”: Langdell on Wall Street, 1855–1870. Law & Social Inquiry 29:39–104.Google Scholar
Konefsky, Alfred S., and Schlegel, John Henry 1982. Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Histories of American Law Schools. Harvard Law Review 95:833–51.Google Scholar
Langdell, Christopher C. 1882-83. Annual Report of the Dean of the Law School. In Annual Report of the President and Treasurer of Harvard College, 1882–83, 90–95. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar
Langdell, Christopher C. 1871-75. Check Ledger. Christopher Columbus Langdell Papers. Harvard Law School Library, Special Collections.Google Scholar
Langdell, Christopher C. 1886. Address. In Harvard Law School Association, Report of the Organization and of the First general Meeting, 1886, 49–50. Boston: Harvard Law School Association. Google Scholar
Langdell, Christopher C. to Wambaugh, Eugene. 26 Mar. 1892. Eliot Papers. Box 82.Google Scholar
Langdell, Christopher C., to Eliot, Charles W. 22 Aug. 1892. Eliot Papers. Box 82.Google Scholar
Langdell, Christopher C. 1894. The Harvard Law School, 1869–1894. Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 2:490–98.Google Scholar
Langdell, Christopher C. to Eliot, Charles W. 22 Nov. 1897. Eliot Papers. Box 130.Google Scholar
Langdell, Christopher C. July 1906. Will and Probate Papers. Docket #71864. Middlesex County Courthouse. Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Lee, Blewett, to Eliot, Charles W. 15 Mar. 1897. Eliot Papers. Box 139A.Google Scholar
Noble, J. C. to Eliot, Charles W. 20 Apr. 1883. Eliot Papers. Box 71.Google Scholar
Obituaries. 1922. Bulletin of the Phillips Exeter Academy Jan. 1922:18–19.Google Scholar
Oleson, Alexandra, and Voss, John, eds. 1979. The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Google Scholar
Parker, Francis E., toAdams, John Q. 18 Dec. 1882. Eliot Papers. Box 71.Google Scholar
Parsons, Theophilus, toEliot, Charles W. 1 Dec. 1869. Eliot Papers. Box 66.Google Scholar
Persons, Stow. 1873. The Decline of American Gentility. New York: Columbia University Press. Google Scholar
Pound, Roscoe. 1943. Joseph Henry Beale. Harvard Law Review 56:695–98.Google Scholar
Putnam, William L., toEliot, Charles W. 25 Apr. 1891. Eliot Papers. Box 81.Google Scholar
Ross, Dorothy. 1991. The Origins of American Social Science. New York: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar
Schlegel, John H. 1985. Between the Harvard Founders and the American Legal Realists: The Professionalization of the American Law Professor. Journal of Legal Education 36:311–25.Google Scholar
Schofield, William. 1907. Christopher Columbus Langdell. American Law Register vol. 55 old series, 46:273–96.Google Scholar
Schouler, James. 1889. Cases without Treatises. American Law Review 23:1–10.Google Scholar
Scudder, Henry J., toHoar, E. R. 9 June 1883. Eliot Papers. Box 71.Google Scholar
Shattuck, George O., toEliot, Charles W. 17 Dec. 1869. Eliot Papers. Box 66.Google Scholar
Sheeseley, John. 2002. Ezra Ripley Thayer: Dean of the Harvard Law School 1910–15. Harvard Law School, Third-year Paper. Harvard Law School Library.Google Scholar
Siegel, Stephen A. 2001. John Chipman Gray and the Moral Basis of Classical Legal Thought. Iowa Law Review 86:1513–99.Google Scholar
Smith, Jeremiah, toEliot, Charles W. 12 Mar. 1890. Eliot Papers. Box 79.Google Scholar
Smith, Jeremiah. to Eliot, Charles W. 10 April 1890. Eliot Papers. Box 79.Google Scholar
Smith, Jeremiah. to Eliot, Charles W. 4 Jan. 1907. Eliot Papers. Box 96, letterbook, 7–8.Google Scholar
Starks, G. E. n.d. Christopher Columbus Langdell. One-page typescript in biographical file of Christopher C. Langdell, 1845. Phillips Academy Archives, Exeter, NH.Google Scholar
Stevens, Robert B. 1983. Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Google Scholar
Sutherland, Arthur E. 1967. The Law at Harvard: A History of Men and Ideas, 1817–1967. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar
Taft, William H., toThayer, James B. 11 June 1898. Eliot Papers. Box 92/268–269.Google Scholar
Thayer, James Bradley. Papers. Harvard Law School Library, Special Collections.Google Scholar
Thayer, James Bradley. to Eliot. 13 Nov. 1869. Eliot Papers. Box 66.Google Scholar
Thayer, James Bradley. 18—. Correspondence and Memoranda, 1871–1883. Harvard Law School Library, Special Collections. 6 vols.Google Scholar
Thayer, James Bradley. to Thayer, Sophy. 17 June 1883. Thayer Memoranda. vol. 6, 4–5.Google Scholar
Thayer, James Bradley. to Eliot, Charles W. 10 Oct. 1889. Eliot Papers. Box 77.Google Scholar
Thayer, James Bradley. to Eliot, Charles W. 16 Oct. 1889. Eliot Papers. Box 77.Google Scholar
Thayer, James Bradley. 1895. The Teaching of English Law at Universities. Harvard Law Review 9:169–84.Google Scholar
Wambaugh, Eugene, toEliot, Charles W. 30 May 1892. Eliot Papers. Box 83.Google Scholar
Wambaugh, Eugene. to Eliot, Charles W. [June 1892?]. Eliot Papers. Box 83.Google Scholar
Wambaugh, Eugene. to Thayer, James B. 17 Feb. 1892. Thayer Papers. Box 20, f. 2.Google Scholar
Wambaugh, Eugene, to Thayer, James B. 30 Mar. 1889. Thayer Papers. Box 27, f. 15.Google Scholar
Warren, Charles. 1908. History of the Harvard Law School and of Early Legal Conditions in America, vol. 2. New York: Lewis. Google Scholar
Warren, Edward H. 1942. Spartan Education. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Google Scholar
Warren, Joseph, toWarren, Charles. 2 June 1908. Charles Warren Papers, Harvard Law School Library, Special Collections. Box 37.Google Scholar
Washburn, Emory. [ 1877?]. Harvard Law School. Manuscript in Samuel F. Batchelder Papers, Cambridge Historical Society, Cambridge, MA. Box 2, f. 14.Google Scholar
Washburn, John D., toThayer, James B. 5 Dec. 1873. Thayer Papers. Box 20, f. 1.Google Scholar
White, G. Edward. 1993. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar
Wilby, Charles, toEliot, Charles W. 11 June 1898. Eliot Papers. Box 92/268–269.Google Scholar
Williston, Samuel. 1921. Jeremiah Smith. Harvard Graduates Magazine 30:157.Google Scholar
Williston, Samuel. to Eliot, Charles W. 22 Apr. 1890. Eliot Papers. Box 79.Google Scholar
Williston, Samuel. 1943. Joseph Henry Beale: A Biographical Sketch. Harvard Law Review 56:686–89.Google Scholar