A Plea for Lawyer-Schools

Abstract

EVERY few years, during the past fifteen, I have made a speech or written an article expressing my views about the deficiencies of American legal education.' No one has ever paid much attention to those views.Here I shall do little more than repeat what I've often said before, thinking wistfully that perhaps this time some of my audience will not dissent.2 American legal education went badly wrong some seventy years ago when it was seduced by a brilliant neurotic.I refer to the wellknown founder of the so-called case system, Christopher Columbus Langdell.I call him a neurotic advisedly.He was a cloistered, bookish man, and bookish, too, in a narrow sense.In his student days at Harvard Law School, he haunted the library, poring over the Year Books; he is said to have expressed regrets that he had not lived in the time of the Plantagenets.In his sixteen years of practice he led a secluded life, seeing little of clients, for the most part in the law library writing briefs and drafting pleadings for other lawyers.One of his biographers says of that period, "In the almost inaccessible retirement of his office, in the library of the Law Institute, he did the greater part of his work.He went little into company."Returned to Harvard as a law teacher, there soon to become Dean, he is said to have referred to "a comparatively recent case decided by Lord Hardwicke."His pedagogic theory reflected the man.The experience of the lawyer * This article is based upon an address delivered at the National Student Conference on Legal Education, New York City, July 12, 1947.The text of the original address has, however, been expanded to enlarge on suggestions which, because of time limits, could not be considered in detail at the Conference.' United States Circuit Judge, Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

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