No Cheers for the American Law School--A Legal Historian's Complaint, Plea, and Modest Proposal
![handle is hein.journals/llj71 and id is 249 raw text is: No Cheers for the American Law School? A Legal
Historian's Complaint, Plea, and Modest Proposal*
By HAROLD M. HYMAN**
Two cheers for 1870 [and] The American
Law Schooll Yale Law School professor Robert
Stevens commanded in 1970, celebrating the
centennial of Christopher Columbus Langdell's
legal innovations at Harvard Law School.'
Many more than two cheers have sounded for
Langdell-Harvard law methods and personnel
in the century since 1870. As example, early in
these decades of sustained applause, Lord
James Bryce asserted in 1895 that there was
nothing ... . in which America had advanced
more beyond the mother country than in the
provision she [the United States] makes for
legal education.2
As Stevens noted, ever since Bryce, compari-
sons of American and English legal education,
especially those published between 1950 and
1970 have restated the theme that the American
law school encouraged superior teaching and
produced superior graduates. The documenta-
tion in this impressive pride of scholarly esti-
mates is weighty, the research exhaustive, the
judgments restrained and, seemingly, reason-
able.3
Therefore, it appeared reasonable in 1970
for Professor Stevens to give at least two cheers
for the modem law school's centenary: quiet
* Paler presented at the Association of American
Law Schools' 1977 annual meeting in Atlanta, Geor-
gia. The panel, under the auspices of the AALS Li-
brary Committee, was entitled Historical Resources
of American Legal Education and was presented
December 29, 1977.
** Professor of History, Rice University, Houston,
Texas.
Stevens, Two Cheers for 1870: The American Law
School, V PERSPECTIVES IN AM. HIST. 405 (1971).
[Hereinafter cited as Stevens, Two Cheers.]
2 Bryce, THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH, 623 (3d.
ed. 1895).
3 See Gower,EnglishLegal Training, 13 MOD. L.REv.
137 (1950); Davis, The Future of Judge-made Public
Law in England, 61 CoLum. L. REv. 201 (1961); Twin-
ing, Pericles and the Plumber, 83 L. Q. REv. 396 (1967);
B. Abel-Smith and R. Stevens, LAWYERS AND THE
COURTS (1967), chaps. vii and xiii; Q. Johnstone and
D. Hopson, LAWYERS AND THEIR WORK (1967), IV;
Abel-Smith and Stevens, IN SEARCH OF JUSTICE (1968),
chap. X; L. 0. Jaffe, ENGLISH AND AMERICAN JUDGES
AS LAWMAKERS (1969), chap. V; see also R. Wettach,
ed., A CENTURY OF LEGAL EDUCATION (1947).
cheers, for they were offered in a scholarly,
low-circulation historian's periodical. It was
even proper for a Yale Law faculty member to
salute Harvard. For almost no other pedagogic
victory in any discipline is comparable to
Langdelrs and Harvard's triumph in terms of
territorial spread and duration of professional
acceptance. Harvard Law School modes be-
came, and remain, American legal education
writ large-very large. Whether associated with
the Morrill Land Grant Act state tax-supported
universities and their numerous recent urban
progeny, or with private universities; or stand-
ing alone without association with a university,
law schools have patterned themselves more or
less on the Harvard model, at least as campus
policy makers far from the Charles River envis-
aged the Cambridge parent. If the 1930's al-
tered the structure of legal education, the de-
cade did so in a Langdellian context.4
Langdell's success resulted partially because
his contributions came just at the right time,
Yale Law School's Sterling Professor Grant
Gilmore suggested in 1977. With the Civil War,
America and American law, had stopped hap-
pily romping through a perpetually sunlit Jack-
sonian Garden of Eden. The law, Gilmore
wrote, was, by 1870 .... condemned to wander
uncertainly in the . . . blackest night of con-
tradictory and competing ideologies, of hectic
strains caused by vast territorial expansion and
urban growth, of rasping technological, indus-
trial, commercial and extractive entrepreneur-
ship and of tense intergroup relationships un-
anticipated by Blackstone, Marshall, Kent,
Story or Taney. And yet, Gilmore continued,
because of Langdell and his Harvard Law
School cohorts, disciples and emulators,
... American law apparently achieved its
greatest triumphs during this [post-Civil
War] period. Never had lawyers and judges
and the new breed of law professors been
so confident, so self-assured, so convinced
beyond the shadow of a doubt, that they
were serving not only righteousness but
truth. Never before had the idea of law as
4 Stevens, Two Cheers, supra note 1, at 435 n.; E. L.
Brown, LAWYERS, LAW SCHOOLS, AND THE PUBLIC
SERVICE (1948).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/llj71&div=33&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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No Cheers for the American Law School--A Legal Historian's Complaint, Plea, and Modest Proposal
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