Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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W THE FIIUNDING 0F THE HARVARD LAW SCHO0L

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The inveterate trick of seeing the particular as an instance of some general was on occasion baffling and irritating, especially to those who did not want to discuss inconvenient questions. The validity of the general, or the existence of a relationship between it and the particular, might he open to challenge. But what was above all important was the integrity, discipline and steadiness of the effort. It made him, in matters public and private, legal and a-legal, an incomparably wise counselor. Hosts of men-students and, it is reported, even Presidents-came to recognize this, and to recognize also that the value of his counsel was not at all dependent on agree- ment or disagreement with his specific convictions. Some members of his classes were impatient that he gave them so few rules for the out-of-hand decision of cases. The majority, I think, quickly or slowly came to realize that he was teaching some- thing vastly more important-he was teaching, by example and otherwise, the method of wise counsel, the method indeed of law itself. It was a corollary of Mr. Frankfurter's view both of law and of the function of teaching that he was intensely interested in procedure, in its technical as well as its more spacious aspects. For the mere holding of a case was only a fragment of law, and perhaps not even that. But the way in which it was decided illumined the whole legal process. Hence it was that he would spend hours in taking apart exhaustively a single litigation. As so often happens, the impractical proved for many men to be the truly practical. It was a conunon experience of those who had taken his courses to discover that such training did more than anything else in their Law School work to make them feel at home in the law. Similarly, a feeling for the processes of government, as well as of litigation, was part of the significant residue of his seminars. It is not, I think, laboring the point to assimilate this passion for procedure to his whole intellectual outlook and to his effectiveness as a teacher and otherwise. For law is essentially a way of life, and the faith of a scholar is at bottom a faith in an intellectual procedure. Langdell Hall October 1, 1939 I16l

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The minutes of a meeting of the Corporation on May 14, 1817, at which il was voted to establish the Harvard Law School. 8