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Book Review
| Anthony T. Kronman, editor, History of the Yale Law School: The Tercentennial Lectures, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. 304. $30.00 (ISBN 0-300-09564-3).
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| What makes Yale Law School different? Different from what? From Harvard Law School, that's what. The essays in the current volume began as lectures celebrating Yale University's tercentennial. As Anthony Kronman points out in the "Introduction," these works are not meant to be a comprehensive history of the school. They all, however, try to delineate the unique features of Yale Law School's approach to legal education. |
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Robert Stevens begins by sketching the conservative and indeed provincial beginnings of Yale College, which kept the law school "a local law school with pretensions" until the 1930s (12). In his view, the "modern" Yale Law School began with the appointment of Eugene Rostow as dean in 1956 (14). |
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John Langbein's two essays on the early history of the school illuminate the beginnings of the Yale difference, which were not evident at the beginnings of the beginning. Langbein is candid about the utilitarian nature of the instruction offered by the proprietary school with which Yale affiliated in 1826. "It is as though," Langbein writes, "today's Yale University were to announce a merger with the New Haven School of Pipefitting or the New Haven Auto Driving School" (35). It happened because affiliation with a proprietary school allowed Yale to offer legal instruction like other American colleges without putting its own precarious finances at risk. The nature of that instruction was influenced strongly by the early success of the Litchfield Law School, which set classroom instruction on the road to vanquishing apprenticeship, made national rather than local law the subject of instruction, and "imparted a profound private-law bias to the curricular traditions of American legal education" (32). |
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In his second essay, Langbein identifies the beginning of Yale's distinctive approach to legal education. In 1874 Theodore Woolsey gave a lecture to law school alumni in which he suggested that the law school should draw closer to the college, enlarging its teaching of public law and political science. He was not alone in finding in an expanded intellectual menu a way to compete with Columbia's outstandingly successful and very practice-oriented law school. Thus began the Yale emphasis on training lawyers in something more than private law, although Langbein agrees with Stevens that in the nineteenth century Yale Law School did not amount to much. |
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The other essays deal with the 1920s to the 1980s. Robert Gordon tells in detail the story of Yale law professors as policymakers in the New Deal and after and shows how extensive involvement in government permanently stretched the "gigantic rubber band" that concern with professional training creates to pull faculty and their schools back from "adventurous experiments" with activities outside "the private-law centered, doctrine-centered, court-centered, case-centered curriculum" (124). The result was an enlarged curriculum and an enlarged role for the law professors that together "created the romance of Yale Law School as a center of intellectual experience and heterodoxy, and incidentally helped make it glamorous and famous" (125). On the way to those conclusions, Gordon amply illustrates the accomplishments and limitations of his subjects' efforts to bring law and the social sciences closer together. |
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Gaddis Smith's essay also deals with the New Deal and after, but from the point of view of a university administration often exasperated by the public and political activities of its employees in the law school. The story is a sad one of anti-Semitism, fear of financial retaliation from politically and socially conservative alumni, and great unease with unpopular ideas. The tensions caused by the stretching of the gigantic rubber band were obvious, and relations improved only with the presidency of Kingman Brewster beginning in 1963. |
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The final essay by Laura Kalman, entitled "The Dark Ages," deals with the 1960s and early 1970s, a dark time not only because of tensions between faulty and students. There were six denials of tenure in the early 1970s. The student-faculty tensions eased for several reasons: Brewster's handling of the university-wide situation, the sobering effect of a fire in the library that seemed to show clearly the vulnerability of the institution, and, a reader can conclude, fear for their professional futures that led students to accept the faculty's refusal to cancel exams in the spring of 1970. |
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Examining each tenure decision, Kalman cannot make a definitive link with the tumult of the late 1960s but finds it easier to link fear of conflict to the failure to hire teachers associated with Critical Legal Studies. The Yale faculty saw the battles at Harvard over CLS and turned away: "Having lived through one civil war, the Yale Law School faculty did not want another" (206). |
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And although Kalman is quite clear that she considers Charles Clark the parent of the school ("His deanship witnessed the launching of the most ambitious challenge anywhere ever to the hegemony of Harvard and Langdell" [154]), the reader can conclude that it was the deanship of Guido Calabresi that at last brought the school out of Harvard's shadow. Perhaps the last sentence of Kalman's essay says it all: "If Yale is number one, can Yale still be Yale?" |
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| William P. LaPiana
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| New York Law School |
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