The Life of Langdell Has Not Been Logic; It Has Been Experience

BRUCE A. KIMBALL

William LaPiana has led the way in searching for, identifying, and examining new evidence about Langdell, so it is gratifying to learn that he is informed by my revisions of Langdell's bibliography, teaching schedule, and career chronology. LaPiana also affirms the significance of Langdell's early lectures on partnership and commercial paper, adding informative points both about Langdell's views and their possible influence on others. However, the reconstructions of discussions from Langdell's classes are speculative, in LaPiana's judgment, and to some extent superfluous, because "one can certainly concede the point [that the Dean was not 'dogmatic, rigid, and closeminded'] even without resorting to the reconstructed discussions."	1
There is no need to repeat here the discussion about the methodological validity of the reconstructions, but it bears re-emphasizing, first, that imaging the past is inevitable. John Henry Schlegel's response, for example, conveys a striking image of Langdell; so the question is not whether, but how imagination will be employed and linked to the available evidence. Second, historians' recent efforts at and interest in imaginative reconstructions arise from an appreciation of the countervailing nuances and subtleties that emerge as one tries to weave an image out of the original sources. As LaPiana insightfully reveals, the Langdell appearing in the tapestry of interwoven annotations invites the sometimes misguided and sometimes justified criticism of his contemporaries and successors in various respects. So the outcome of the admittedly hazardous enterprise of reconstructing these class discussions is suggestive, nuanced, and variegated. This outcome, I submit, is what one would hope to harvest from examining new sources, whereas a simple and reductionist image of Langdell is what ultimately emerges from the scholasticism of analyzing analyses that rely on limited sources.	2
In fine, LaPiana is somewhat conservative methodologically but liberal minded in his interpretation. He has stringent criteria for handling evidence; but if those criteria are met, he is willing to draw conclusions that contravene the received view of Langdell and the inception of case method teaching. Howard Schweber's response is nearly the converse.	3
He concurs with LaPiana that we must continue looking for and at new evidence but is more liberal in generously crediting the reconstructions of class discussions. Yet, Schweber appears less inclined to infer that this material revises any aspect of the traditional portrait of Langdell's pedagogical purposes or jurisprudence. Even Langdell's early lectures on partnership and commercial paper—or, at least, Langdell's self-profession of heresy—are interpreted ironically by Schweber in line with the longstanding view of Langdell. Schweber correctly observes that I do not attempt to infer from my portrait of Langdell's teaching much "substantial" change in the understanding of his jurisprudence, and maintains that, even if I had, it would not have been successful. In Schweber's judgment, my study is relatively successful within narrow limits, which are drawn around Langdell's demeanor as teacher and do not include his jurisprudence, administration of the law school, curriculum design, or even pedagogical goals. This judgment seems to rest fundamentally on the proposition conveyed in Schweber's sentence: "Yet it is generally agreed that the most typical and the most influential of Langdell's works—the one Thomas Grey accurately calls 'most Langdellian'—is the Summary of the Law of Contracts, which appeared in 1880...." I take this to be a basic premise of Schweber's view as well as a self-referential standard that is generally embraced by those writing about Langdell. The quoted sentence says that we already know what is Langdellian and not Langdellian; it implies that any new evidence must be interpreted in terms of that a priori standard. What fits the standard naturally confirms it; what departs from the standard may be discounted through such standard hermeneutical strategies as being interpreted ironically (e.g., self-professions of heresy) or confined to the insubstantial margins (e.g., personal demeanor). Confirmation of this approach lies in the fact that the standard "is generally agreed" upon by scholars, including many of those cited by Schlegel.	4
To be sure, this kind of standard is often applied legitimately because new writings by a major historical figure appear rarely and adventitiously. But three factors distinguish this case. First is the considerable amount of new material (of which I have read only part). Second is the dating of the new material. Much of it comes from an early and intense period of Langdell's work, completed before most of that used as evidence in the past. Finally, newly examined letters assert that the sources for the received view of Langdell date from a period when his work was becoming skewed by a serious "defect."	5
Taken together, these points argue against interpreting the body of new early sources in terms of the established view based upon later and possibly distorted sources. That approach, in fact, violates standard principles of textual interpretation. If Aristotle's lost early dialogues were suddenly recovered, no classical scholar would begin by pulling out that most Aristotelian treatise, the Metaphysics, and trying to square the new material with the received view that is based upon later writings of a quite different genre. Instead, the scholar would try to examine the new early material through new lenses and then interpret the later material in light of the earlier. This is the reason—apart from space limitations—that I do not try to make particular references to the recent discussion about Langdell's jurisprudence. I hesitate to address questions about whether Langdell was more like a geometer or a liberal empiricist, because I am not even sure they are rightly posed. 1	6
John Henry Schlegel is perhaps correct in saying that my essay is "not particularly relevant" to what he understands as the recent debate about Langdell. But it is equally true that his understanding is "not particularly relevant" to the nondefective Langdell. Schlegel's account of the recent debate, though admirably cogent and conceptual, is paradoxical and, at this time, unfruitful. His account of the forms of recent arguments about the historical forms of legal science, that may or may not fit Langdell, adds little to our current understanding of why or how this impecunious introvert from New Hampshire transformed (for better or worse) Harvard Law School and legal pedagogy—particularly in light of the hundreds of failed attempts at reform made by leaders of professional schools over the ensuing century.	7
It is not difficult to imagine the course of American jurisprudence without Justice Holmes. Pragmatism was emerging; behaviorism was coming; empiricism and instrumentalism in economics, sociology, and political science were on the horizon. That jurisprudence could have escaped these influences, with or without Holmes, is scarcely conceivable. But the future course of legal education and pedagogy without Langdell is hard to foresee. That is, we do not fully understand what Langdell was doing or why, so we need his idiosyncracy as an explanatory factor. At the same time, this is why we disagree about what he was trying to do and did.	8
The basic point of my essay is to recommend that, if we follow the lead of LaPiana and examine the sources, a great deal is yet to be learned; and a good part of that learning entails interpreting not the formalism, but the humanism of Langdell—what Schweber insightfully calls "biography." This means not that Langdell becomes "a regular guy," but that we try to understand him within the complexity of the social, institutional, intellectual, and emotional factors that influenced his situation. 2 Hence, my title. This recommendation departs from the view of Schlegel, who apparently feels that much is still to be learned in our armchairs, analyzing the historiographical forms of historical forms of argument. Schlegel's approach befits, even determines, the Langdell that he has created.	9
In contrast, I suspect that a more complex, interesting, and, yes, intelligent Langdell awaits in the archives of the publisher of his casebooks, in the record of his investments, perhaps in the medical records of his physician, possibly in some town halls in New Hampshire, and likely in the boxes of his undated papers in the Special Collections at Harvard Law School Library that no one has ever read. I hold no brief for Langdell. No less intriguing to me are the complicated processes whereby Walter B. Cannon brought case method from Harvard Law School into medical education 3 and Wallace B. Donham did the same in business education. 4 But I am inclined to think that judgments about just how stupid Langdell was betoken a misguided, if not self-aggrandizing, approach to studying the topic.	10
Harvard's Dunster Hall, incidentally, is named for Harvard's first president, Henry Dunster (1609-1659), who was ousted in 1654 for a heretical drift into Baptist principles. Facile generalizations are always discomfited by the particulars. Langdell knew at least this, which is why he drilled students on the cases.	11
Notes       1. Schweber doubts my suggestions that the debate between Whewell and Mill likely informs Langdell's view of inductive teaching. Neither of us has space here to address this issue substantively; but Schweber, relying on a source I quote, objects at least on the grounds that Mill's influence is felt later. Yet, Whewell published his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences in 1840, and Mill published his System of Logic in 1843. Prompted by the appearance of these two summative works, they publicly debated each other's views until Whewell died in 1866. Thus, their prominent debate over the meaning of induction correlates closely with Langdell's formative education (during his twenties) at Harvard College from 1848 to 1850 and at Harvard Law School from 1851 to 1854, while it slightly antedated his introduction of inductive teaching into law. This correlation and the prominence of the debate make it likely that the debate would have informed Langdell's view, if indirectly.       2. For example, this effort would counteract the lamentable habit of crediting at face value Holmes's 1880 judgment of Langdell as a "legal theologian" without factoring in the point that Holmes was reviewing the work of an oddball from New Hampshire who had successfully built and transformed Harvard Law School, while he, Holmes, was still struggling under the unfulfilled expectation that, like his famous father and before the age of forty, he "would likewise enter a profession, undertake original and ultimately renowned, professional scholarship, and accept a professorship at Harvard University." Conversely, Langdell and his protégé Ames were silent when in 1882 President Eliot asked the three-person, law school faulty whether they "were prepared to make any effort to get an endowment" to support a professorship for Holmes. G. Edward White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13, 200. Though Langdell's reticence in this regard was likely unknown to Holmes, the latter returned the favor in his brief address at the commemoration of Langdell's retirement as Dean by not naming or even referring to Langdell and obliquely criticizing most of what Langdell stood for: enshrining "learning," "historic continuity," and "reason" in legal education. Address by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harvard Law School Association, Report of the Ninth Annual Meeting, June 25, 1895, in especial honor of Christopher Columbus Langdell (Boston: Harvard Law School Association, 1895), 60-6Langdell's and Holmes's judgments of each other are based not only on logic but also their experience.       3. Walter B. Cannon, "The Case Method of Teaching Systematic Medicine," Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 142 (1900): 31-36.       4. Melvin T. Copeland, "The Genesis of the Case Method in Business Instruction," in The Case Method at the Harvard Business School, ed. Malcolm P. McNair (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), 25-33.

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