Logic and experience: American legal thought and legal education, 1800-1920

This work is an attempt to locate in the history of American legal thought the transformation of American legal education in the later nineteenth century begun at Harvard under Christopher Columbus Langdell.;As dean of Harvard Law School, Langdell cooperated with Charles Eliot in the transformation of the school into a rigorous training ground for professionals. Exemplified by higher standards for admission and graduation and the case method, rigor helped to make the school the ally of lawyers who were more and more concerned with the image of the profession.;In spite of this ground for cooperation, the law taught at Harvard by the new class of academic lawyers became a barrier to complete cooperation with the practicing bar. The first generation of Harvard teachers challenged the antebellum concept of legal science by teaching narrow technical principles like those put forward in Langdell's work on contracts. Many articulate lawyers were determined to preserve the notion of law as a science of eternal principles as a bulwark against social and economic change. The rift between practitioners and teachers was finally healed in the early twentieth century when the two groups found they could cooperate as fellow professionals in the expounding of a narrow science of law based on technical expertise rather than morality.;Antebellum legal thought was shaped by a belief in law as an inductive science of principles and a tradition of legal practice dominated by the stereotyped forms of action of the common law. Both these concepts were challenged by changes in the law of civil procedure beginning in the late 1840s. The basis of practice became more and more the search for precedents whose facts were similar to those of the case at hand. In addition, the destruction of the forms of action as organizing devices led to the formulation of organizing theories based on the facts of cases rather than vague principles. Both Langdell's emphasis on cases in teaching and the theoretical nature of his work on contracts are shown to reflect his experience as a practitioner.