Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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only on examination, a practice which had been abandoned some time in the 182O's, the faculty ignored this requirement and the Corporation nevertheless continued to grant law degrees to any man who stayed in residence for eighteen months. Gradually the Law School began to evoke strong criticism. In 1868 Professor Parker resigned, Professor Parsons followed the next year. In 1869 the University elected a new Presi- dent, Charles W. Eliot, a scientist and man of great vision. He had an opportunity to rebuild the Law School and for this work in 1870 he chose a forty-three year old scholarly New York practitioner named Christopher Columbus Lang- dell with whom he had been acquainted when Eliot was an undergraduate and Langdell was a law student. Langdell became Dane Professor in January, 1870, and the following fall he was elected the first Dean of the Law School. Langdell had been much impressed by the in- creasing preoccupation of intellectual Americans . 15

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a ' .flijgrcz 4, The Austin Hall Steps about 1902, and opposite the same scene more recently. with the scientific process. He was convinced that the law could be treated as a science like the physical sciences, and that the materials for this science could be found in decided cases. To teach the science of the law he felt that students should go through a process comparable to that of young scientists in laboratories, that is to say, they should examine specific instances and derive from them general principles which would apply to other similar instances. To make this process possible, Langdell developed the first Casebook, a collection of decisions on the law of contract. He carried out his laboratory method by having the students read the cases in advance and discuss them in class by dialectic, rather than make notes on an expository lecture concerning general principles, which the professor had composed in advance. Thus began Langdell's version of the much dis- cussed case method. Classroom dialectic was at least as old as Story, and the study of cases in the School went back to its earliest day. Langdell's novelty was in the degree of independent responsibility which he left to the student to derive his own conclu- sions from informed observation of specific in- stances, observation corrected and made more acute by classroom discussion. Langdell's case method attracted so much attention that his ad- ministrative skills in reforming the Law School's curriculum and type of teacher have been to some extent obscured. With President Eliot's full support, Langdell began insisting that abler stu- dents be selected for admission even if this tem- porarily cut down enrollments. He insisted that students be examined for promotion or for gradu- ation, that the LL.B. course be extended from eighteen months to three years of residential study. Dean Langdell took another step which then ap- peared rashg he selected for appointment to the faculty of the Law School, again with President Eliot's cordial support, a brilliant young law stu- dent who had only just obtained his LL.B., James Barr Ames. Some devoted friends of the School were shocked at this departure from the practice of appointing only men established in practice or judges with years of experience. Ames was a devoted disciple of Langdell, and proved even better than Langdell at the case-method of teach- ing and at classroom dialectic. When Langdell re- tired as Dean in 1895, Professor Ames succeeded him in that office. Though Langdell probably exaggerated the applicability of the methods of physical science to the law, his conduct of the Law School was so remarkably successful that after the first few years, enrollments skyrocketed. Fortunately Lang- dell had foreseen this increase and with the help of a generous gift .of Edward Austin, Esq., of Boston, he had built Austin Hall. The architect was H. H. Richardson of Boston, who was de- voted to the neo-Romanesque style so notable in Austin and in Richardson's other work. By the end of Langdell's deanship in 1895, the School had a registration of 400 and its numbers were still rapidly increasing. The succeeding Ames deanship lasted until 1910. Dean Ames' admin- istration carried the Law School from its formative period into an institution much like the present. By 1904 the School had more than 700 students and Austin Hall was outgrown. The Corporation wisely foresaw that growth would continue, and its architects, planning Langdell Hall, arranged for a building which could then be partially built, and could later be expanded. In 1906 that part 16

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ld a coming need for much more teaching, ipoiifticn the fall of 1909 the faculty still had only nine professors of law. Dean Ames fell gravely ill and Austin Wakeman Scott, who had graduated the proceeding June, was called back to the School in December of that year as an instructor to take over the Dean's courses in pleading aud CQUHY- Dean Ames died in January, 1910 andgin May of that year Austin Scott became an .assistant pro- fessor. The youth of the School is exemplified h f t that in 1966 Dane Professor Emeritus b Szotttestiiiz comes daily to his .office in Laggdil and is working hard at new editions of his oo s on trusts and on the American Law Institute Reslatement of the Conflict of Laws. For a brief time, from 1910 to 1915, Ezra d h' . He was an Ripley Thayer held the eans ip eminent alumnus of the School, a scholarly and charming member of the Boston Bar. Following Dean Thayer's untimely death in 1915 Professor Roscoe Pound became Dean in his place. Pound served as Dean from 1916 to 1936, and in 1964 died as a University Professor emeritus. Poundis deanship began just before World War I reduced the School's student population to a handful of men all unfitted for field service. A large number of the professors left for government service of one sort or another. The armistice of 1918 brought a rush of students back to the Schoolg by 1925 the original Langdell Hall was much too small to take care of the load. In 1926-1927 the building was completed on a plan much larger than the original design of 1905, the west wing was added and the northerly wing extended con- siderably farther than the architect had originally contemplated. The School continued to grow- by 1930 it had almost as many students as it now has, though the faculty was only half as large, Dean Pound's administration reflected a num- ber of significant movements in American law, His main theoretical commitment was to uS0Ci0- logical jurisprudence -the idea that the law ex- isted to serve the best interests of society and that man should mold it to serve those interests. Today few people remember the day when a number of otherwise sensible lawyers thought of law as a brooding omnipresence which tran- scended man's poor powers, and-indeed practical legislators had for many generations before 1920 been giving their constituents what they wanted, without realizing that such legislation called for any theoretical justification. Pound's Scope and Purpose of Sociological Jurisprudence in the Harvard Law Review of 1911 and 1912 showed that theory was catching up with practice. An- other effort occurred in the field of penal law. During the 1920's the United States sensed a deep dissatisfaction with the administration of criminal justice. The Law School became con- spicuously active in this field, in the early 1930's it established a Criminal Law Institute as part of the School. The Institute discontinued its work after a brief time, but today's Professor Emeritus Sheldon Glueck, and his wife Eleanor, have car- ried forward from that day to the present the Institute's concept of criminal law as a study to which scientific methods can be applied. The last days of Dean Pound's administration Lunizdcll Hall-Built about 1906 the right wing contemplated by the original ' ' ' j I . . . 1 A Q j plan had not been bu lt when this picture was 1-lk' 11- T111 111111111112 C0111111110d the bulk of the library with adjoining reading rooms, lecture rooms, and the offices of the faculty. .-- 4...--I ,,. ...J , The lu tale West vs saw 1 the l aid Deal prol mov 1611 llllll l lati ini C01 W 01 lt it lt 18