“Warn Students That I Entertain Heretical Opinions, Which They Are Not to Take as Law”: The Inception of Case Method Teaching in the Classrooms of the Early C. C. Langdell, 1870–1883

Law and History Review

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 57-140

  Kimball, Bruce A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER   (United States)

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EID: 85006492753     PISSN: 07382480     EISSN: 19399022     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/744185     Document Type: Article

References (147)

1. By the end of Langdell's deanship this potential influence was already evident to Eliot, who observed that the reforms at HLS “will have made a valuable contribution to the better organization of professional instruction in the United States,” if the HLS student body remained relatively large. Charles W. Eliot, Annual Reports of the President and the Treasurer of Harvard College, 1893-94 (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1895), 23. See also Bruce A. Kimball, The “True Professional Ideal” in America: A History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 198-300.
2. William P. LaPiana has provided the most detailed and informed acccount of these developments at Harvard. LaPiana, Logic and Experience: The Origin of Modern American Legal Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See, too, Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 35-72. 3.1 follow here the dominant view, rather than the minor historiographical tradition maintaining that Langdell's case method was not an innovation. Space does not permit a rebuttal to this minor tradition, which has generally been advanced either by contemporaries who disparaged Langdell's method or by subsequent observers who sought to foster the pejorative view of Langdell described below.
3. Morton Horwitz thus takes the inaugural year of Langdell's deanship, 1870, as the starting point for the reign of “legal orthodoxy” in American jurisprudence. Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
4. See Thomas C. Grey, “Langdell's Orthodoxy,” University of Pittsburgh Law Review 45 (1983): 1-53.
5. See Robert W. Gordon, “The Elusive Transformation,” review of The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy, by Morton J. Horwitz, Yale Journal of Law & Humanities 6 (1994): 137-39.1 am grateful to Daniel R. Ernst for bringing this helpful reference to my attention.
6. [Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.], [Review of] A Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts… by C. C. Langdell… [and] Principles of the English Law of Contract. By Sir William R. Anson,” American Law Review 14 (1880): 234.
7. Jerome Frank, “Why Not a Clinical Lawyer-School,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 81 (1933): 907.
8. Grant Gilmore, The Death of Contract (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 13.
9. These words of Grant Gilmore are quoted affirmatively in Michael H. Hoeflich, “Law & Geometry: Legal Science from Leibniz to Langdell,” American Journal of Legal History 30(1986): 121, n. 100.
10. Samuel F. Batchelder, “C. C. Langdell, Iconoclast,” Bits of Harvard History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924), 318, n. 1. The article first appeared in The Green Bag 18(1906).
11. Charles Warren, History of the Harvard Law School and of Early Legal Conditions in America (New York: Lewis Publishing, 1908), 2:372-74.
12. Batchelder, “C. C. Langdell, Iconoclast,” 303-23. See above, note 11.
13. Philip P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 232, 235, n. 2.
14. Gilmore, The Death of Contract, 14.
15. Clarke B. Whittier, Letter to Francis S. Philbrick, 10 December 1925, Box 1, Philbrick Papers.
16. See Marcia Speziale, “Langdell's Concept of Law as Science: The Beginning of Antiformalism in American Legal Theory,” Vermont Law Review 5 (1980): 1-37; Anthony Chase, “The Birth of the Modern Law School,” American Journal of Legal History 23 (1979): 329-48, and “Origins of Modern Professional Education: The Harvard Case Method Conceived as Clinical Instruction in Law,” Nova Law Journal 5 (1981): 323-63; Paul D. Carrington, “Hail! Langdell,” Law & Social Inquiry 20 (1995): 691-760. The most informed and significant work in this regard is LaPiana's, Logic and Experience.
17. John Henry Schlegel, review of The Lost Lawyer, by Anthony Kronman, and Logic and Experience, by William P. LaPiana, Law and History Review 14 (1996): 369.
18. LaPiana expresses appreciation for Langdell in an “Epilogue,” whose tone does not seem fully concordant with that in the body of the book. LaPiana, Logic and Experience, 168-70. Likewise, Carrington seems to honor Langdell by way of apologizing for him in “Hail! Langdell,” 691-760. Anthony Chase is the exception in arguing, based upon Langdell's published writings, that Langdell's approach to case method was virtually the “opposite” of the way it has conventionally been portrayed, particularly by Gilmore. “Origins of Modern Professional Education,” 359.
19. Langdell, A Summary of Equity Pleading, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Charles W. Sever, 1883), iv.
20. Blewett Lee, Letter to Francis S. Philbrick, 18 February 1926, Box 1, Philbrick Papers.
21. Warren, History of the Harvard Law School, 2:460n.
22. James Barr Ames, “Christopher Columbus Langdell,” (1909), reprinted in Ames, Lectures on Legal History and Miscellaneous Legal Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913), 474-76.
23. The Centennial History of the Harvard Law School, 1817-1917 (Cambridge: Harvard Law School Association, 1918), 311.
24. “Christopher Columbus Langdell 1826-1906.” Unpublished typescript distributed by Reference Desk, Harvard Law School Library, [1996], 2p.
25. Full citations to Langdell's works are given in Appendix I. Short titles are employed in this text and these notes.
26. In fact, Langdell and Ames produced the only casebooks in use at HLS until the academic year 1888-89, when John Chipman Gray and William A. Keener introduced their respective casebooks on property and quasi-contracts.
27. Those three courses were “Suretyship and Mortgage,” employing no textbook; “Jurisdiction and Procedure in Equity,” using his Cases in Equity Pleading (1878); and “Jurisdiction and Procedure in Equity,” using his Cases on Equity Jurisdiction (1879-1883) until 1890. 3\.LCon70, 215, 234, 306, 354, 402. These glosses seem to refer to lengthy annotations in ACon71 that summarize doctrine and list full citations of between ten and thirty relevant cases.
28. ACon71 and LCon70, 12, 17,23-25,47, 380, 381, 411, 418. A note on a small piece of paper glued to the foot of a page appears to be in Ames's handwriting, suggesting that he may have used Langdell's copy in his teaching of “Contracts” in the mid-1870s (LCon70, 42). It is also possible that similar underlining in blunt, red pencil in both copies was done by one or the other.
29. See LEq75 and AEq2, 127, 151, 160, 178.
30. James P. Hall, Letter to Francis S. Philbrick, 8 December 1925, Box 1, Philbrick Papers.
31. Learned Hand, Letter to Francis S. Philbrick, 17 February 1926, Box 1, Philbrick Papers.
32. In private correspondence, Eliot wrote that, in his forty-year tenure as president, “the putting of Langdell in charge of the Law School was the best piece of work I did for Harvard University, except the reconstruction of the Medical School in [18]70 and [18]71, and the long fight for the development of the elective system.” “Letter to Henry S. Pritchett,” 13 April 1915. Correspondence of Charles W. Eliot, Small Manucript Collection, Harvard Law School Library.
33. This date follows from the fact, first, that Langdell taught Partnership only during that semester. Furthermore, Langdell frequently quotes from “Lindley,” giving page numbers; and my investigation reveals that these quotations and page numbers fit only the second, 1867 edition of Nathaniel Lindley, A Treatise on the Law of Partnership…, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnson, 1860). Since there appeared a third (1873) and subsequent editions, the dating of the lectures from 1870 correlates appropriately with the interval between Lindley's second (1867) and third (1873) editions. Also, at one point Langdell seems to refer to a student in class: “Notice the… case mentioned by Mr. Mansfield at the last lecture” (v. 1, leaves 70-71). Among the four Mansfields who attended HLS before 1934, Langdell's teaching of Partnership correlates perfectly with Ex. Sumner Mansfield, who attended HLS only during 1869-70. Finally, Langdell also refers to another student, whose name appears to be “Mr. Ayres” and who “in regard to drawing bills in London or New York… informs me that Brown, Shipley & Co. will draw them… for small amounts” (v. 2, leaves 54, 55). This reference fits perfectly with Russell W. Ayres of New York, who also attended HLS only during 1869-70. Both of these references indicate that communication, even during Langdell's lectures, was not only one-way.
34. Isaac Preston Cory, A Practical Treatise on Accounts, Mercantile, Partnerships… Exhibiting a View of the Discrepancies between the System of the Law and of Merchants, 2d ed. (London: W. Pickering, 1839). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the name of Cory and pointing to this reference.
35. Plato, Meno 96e-99c.
36. Batchelder, “C. C. Langdell, Iconoclast,” 381, n. 2; Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism, 232, 235, n. 2.
37. “The raw material of law, [Langdell] devoutly believed, was to be discovered in a library and nowhere else; it consisted, as he himself said, solely of what could be found in the pages of law reports.” Frank, “Why Not a Clinical Lawyer-School,” 908.
38. Stanley N. Katz has insightfully questioned whether Langdell is actually being heretical in attending to the practice of merchants, “since I had always thought the received opinion was that mercantile law depended heavily on the practice of merchants, in counter distinction to most other forms of non-statutory law. Thus practice, rather than judicial opinion, was always a potent factor in the establishment of legal rules in this area.” (Personal correspondence, 25 September 1996.) Nevertheless, even if Langdell were merely being conventional in relying on the practice of merchants in his approach to commercial partnerships and paper, this reliance contradicts the portrayal of Langdell as seeking only for the logical form of law and ignoring the social practices that inform any kind of law. I cannot find any scholarly discussion of Langdell that credits him with any sort of admission that such social practices are relevant.
39. Another source representing an interim pedagogical stage between lecturing with textbooks and case method teaching may be found in Langdell's “Notebooks on Civil Procedure at Common Law, 1871-1876,” 4 vols., which contain lecture notes and commentary from courses on civil procedure taught annually with “cases” but “no textbook” by Langdell between 1871 and 1876.
40. Parker (Harvard A.B. 1877) attended HLS from September 1879 until 1882, when he received the LL.B. On Parker and his copy (abbreviated PEq79) see the first reconstructed class discussion below.
41. That Langdell raises these hypotheticals in class without preconceived answers and for purposes of discussion seems to be confirmed by the fact that Ames, in his annotated copy of Langdell, Cases on Contracts (1871), repeats the questions without recording any answer or rules to resolve them, as he otherwise often does (ACon.71, 24-25).
42. Batchelder, “C. C. Langdell, Iconoclast,” 318, n. 1; Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism, 232, 235, n. 2; Whittier, Letter to Francis S. Philbrick, 10 December 1925.
43. This judgment is based on my comparison of LConJO with ACon71 and LEq75 with AEql and AEq2. Langdell is not hestitant to take issue with the courts, but his contradictions are always nuanced; whereas Ames seems like an eager litigant in writing “Case wrong” beside the title, for example, of the first eight cases in AEql and AEq2 and in ACon71 on 633, 634, 637, 638, 640, 643, 645.
44. An additional, sixth purpose of Langdell's annotations is to make emendations for future editions of the casebook. For example, he corrects misprints or errors in the case reports (90a) and notes “omit” (248a) or “retain” (250a) next to the title of some cases. Since this purpose is not strictly pedagogical, I do not include it among the other five.
45. Charles S. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” (1878), reprinted in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. C. Hartshorn, P. Weiss, and A. W. Burks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-1958), 5: sects. 405-8.
46. See, for example, Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism, 232 and passim.
47. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 106.
48. Davis, now retired, was Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University. The Return of Martin Guerre recreates the experience of the sixteenth-century French peasant Bertrande de Rols and the imposter Arnaud du Tilh, who posed as Bertrande's husband, Martin Guerre, returning from fighting in the wars, until Arnaud was indicted for fraud and convicted. Davis recreates a narrative account of these events that is “in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past” (5).
49. Schama is Mellon Professor in the Social Sciences at Harvard University. The first quarter of Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991) presents three different accounts of the death of British General James Wolfe during the storming of Quebec in 1759. The latter three quarters of Schama's book, loosely connected to the first, reconstruct the widely publicized trial, conviction, and execution of Harvard chemistry professor John Webster for the sensational murder in 1849 of Boston Brahmin George Parkman. What Schama calls his two “historical novellas” (322) are told through the personal testimony of the participants, which Schama reconstructs by “selecting, pruning, editing, commenting, interpreting” the original sources (322).
50. Demos is Samuel Knight Professor of American History at Yale University. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Random House, 1994) describes the 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, by French soldiers and their Indian allies. Demos focuses his attention upon the kidnapped, four-year-old Eunice Williams, who adopted Indian ways, married a Mohawk husband, converted to Catholicism, and lived the rest of her life among her new people. Demos ventures beyond the documentary record in order “to reconstruct at least the outlines of her experience” (140) when he feels he has adequate “grounds for speculation” (110).
51. Edmund Morgan, “Hostages to Fortune,” New York Review of Books (23 June 1994): 37.
52. Schama, Dead Certainties, 322. See the similar opinion in the editor's introduction to review of Dead Certainties, by Simon Schama, American Historical Review 98 (1993): 121.
53. Eva T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991).
54. Demos, The Unredeemed Captive, 22-23.
55. The Unredeemed Captive., 17.
56. Schama, Dead Certainties, 320.
57. Wood, “Novel History,” 16.
58. See Francis Oakley's admirably clear and succinct review and analysis of this controversy in ‘“Anxieties of Influence': Skinner, Figgis, Conciliarism and Early Modern Constitutionalism,” Past & Present 151 (1996): 62-69.
59. Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 17.
60. Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (1960), 2d ed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979), 86.
61. Robert E. Butts, ed., “Introduction,” in William Whewell, Theory of Scientific Method, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 4.
62. William Whewell, “Mr. Mill's Logic,” (1849), reprinted in William Whewell Theory of Scientific Method, ed. Robert E. Butts, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 302.
63. Robert Finlay, “AHR Forum: The Return of Martin Guerre The Refashioning of Martin Guerre,” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 566, 554. See Natalie Zemon Davis, “AHR Forum: The Return of Martin Guerre ‘On the Lame,'” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 572-74, 601-3. The qualification “perhaps” points to the significant exception that few complaints are made about historians relying on anthropology, whose ethnographic method-careful observation, sifting, and reporting of evidence about the particular case-is congenial to historiography. See Demos, The Unredeemed Captive, 282, n. 2, 290, n. 69, 291, n. 79; Thomas E. Burke, review of The Unredeemed Captive, by John Demos, American Historical Review 100(1995): 1290.
64. Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre,” 557.
65. Davis, “'On the Lame,'” 573.
66. Demos makes precisely the same move when, in the absence of particular data about the experience of Eunice Williams among the Mohawk, he deduces events that likely occurred to her personally from the findings of anthropologists about Mohawk life in general. Demos, The Unredeemed Captive, 139-66, 282, n. 2, 290, n. 69, 291, n. 79.
67. Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre,” 570.
68. “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre,”.
69. Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), 7-10 and passim, 382-85 and passim, and The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 230-32 and passim.
70. Schama, Dead Certainties, 322.
71. Dead Certainties.
72. Dead Certainties., 327. Because the absence of any verification makes it impossible to distinguish “passages [that] are purely imagined fiction” from the passages that “have faithfully followed accounts given in letters and journals” (327), Schama may be hoping that the credibility of the latter will extend to the former. But the opposite occurs. The absence of verification, even for verifiable propositions, discredits the factual, rather than validating the fictional.
73. See, for example, his notes on reconstructing experience within a Mohawk village. Demos, The Unredeemed Captive, 273, n. 1, 273, n. 11, 274, n. 14.
74. Demos's narrative includes scarcely less historiographical discussion than his acclaimed A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), which exemplifies the “social history” from which he sees himself departing by employing narrative in The Unredeemed Captive, xi.
75. Burke, review of The Unredeemed Captive, 1290.
76. Demos, The Unredeemed Captive, 140-66.
77. After one such reconstruction, Demos observes, “This, of course, is no more than conjecture.” The Unredeemed Captive, 189-90.
78. Wood, “Novel History”, 12.
79. Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre,” 557.
80. Davis, ‘“On the Lame,'” 575.
81. Eugene Wambaugh, whose name appears on Fig. 2, graduated from Harvard College with an A.B.in 1876 and attended HLS from 1877 until 1880, when he was awarded an LL.B.
82. See “The Papers of Christopher Columbus Langdell” in “Index of Modem Manuscript Collection.” Unpublished typescript in Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library, n.d.
83. Here again, I am grateful for the help of members of the Special Collections Staff at Harvard Law School Library, who often helped me in deciphering questionable readings, although I am solely responsible for the final rendering and any errors that have arisen.
84. Schama, Dead Certainties, 327.
85. Demos, The Unredeemed Captive, 190.
86. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, 108.
87. VNEq75, 33a.
88. AEql, 32a.
89. WEq75, 33a.
90. File of “Letters Received regarding Dean Ames, 1925-1926,” Box 1, Philbrick Papers. See description above.
91. Eugene Wambaugh, “Professor Langdell-A View of His Career,” Harvard Law Review 20 (1906): 1-4; Joseph H. Beale, Jr., “Professor Langdell-His Later Teaching Days,” Harvard Law Review 20 (1906): 9-11; William Schofield, “Christopher Columbus Langdell,” The American Law Register n.s. 46 (1907): 273-96; Ames, “Christopher Columbus Langdell,” 467-82; Warren, History of the Harvard Law School, 2:354-460; Batchelder, “C. C. Langdell, Iconoclast,” 303-23; Franklin G. Fessenden, “The Rebirth of the Harvard Law School,” Harvard Law Review 33 (1920): 493-517.
92. LaPiana, Logic and Experience.
93. Kimball, The “True Professional Ideal” in America.
94. Quinquennial Catalogue of the Law School of Harvard University, 1817-1934, ed. Guy H. Holliday (Cambridge: Harvard Law School, 1934).
95. For example, in ACon71 Ames notes, “Kit changes opinion” (19a) and “Later. L. thinks t h a t… “ (153a).
96. Batchelder, “C. C. Langdell, Iconoclast,” 316; Warren, History of the Harvard Law School, 2:373.
97. Schofield, “Christopher Columbus Langdell,” 275.
98. Henry C. Black, A Dictionary’ of Law (1891; New York: Lawbook Exchange, 1991).
99. Schama, Dead Certainties, 142.
100. LaPiana, Logic and Experience, 14
101. Batchelder, “C. C. Langdell, Iconoclast,” 316; Warren, History of the Harvard Law School, 2:373.
102. According to my interviews conducted with two individuals who served as assistant deans of Harvard Business School in the 1920s: John C. Baker (October 19-20, 1995, Essex Falls, New Jersey); Deane W. Malott (December 12, 1995; Ithaca, New York).
103. Beale, “Professor Langdell-His Later Teaching Days,” 10; Ames, “Christopher Columbus Langdell,” 480-81.
104. In a bill for an account, the plaintiff alleges that the defendant, often a trustee or guardian, owes him money and asks the court of equity to order the defendant to render a documented accounting of the relevant financial transactions, so as to determine how much is owed. See Langdell, A Summary of Equity Pleading (Cambridge, MA: Charles W. Sever, 1877), 35-36. In Phillips v. Phillips (1852), discussed below, the court denies the bill on the grounds that the plaintiff is entitled to the accounting only if he and the defendant have mutual access to the transactions. This narrow ruling means that the plaintiff must seek an account through an action in courts of common law, the other main branch of the English legal system.
105. “Suing on an account” or “action on an account” was a common law suit analogous to a “bill for an account” in courts of equity. The latter had long displaced the former in English courts by the time of Phillips v. Phillips (1852). J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (London: Butterworths, 1979), 300-305.
106. Beale, “Professor Langdell-His Later Teaching Days,” 10.
107. Beale recalls, “once in a great while, something would amuse [Langdell], and then he would throw back his great head with a laugh that seemed to have the full strength of his mind in it.” Beale, “Professor Langdell-His Later Teaching Days,” 9-10.
108. John Mitford, (the Late Lord Redesdale), A Treatise on the Pleadings in Suits in the Court of Chancery, 5th ed. with notes by Josiah W. Smith (London: Stevens & Norton, 1847).
109. See LEq75, 77a.
110. Langdell, A Summary (Cambridge, MA: Charles W. Sever, 1877), 130p.
111. “Students soon learned that any position they might advance was pretty soon to be followed by the question ‘Could you suggest a reason?’ This came with such frequent iteration that it was something of a by-word. To this day the question ‘Could you suggest a reason,’ will probably produce a smile among old pupils of Professor Langdell.” Schofield, “Christopher Columbus Langdell,” 275.
112. A negative plea actually denies a “material allegation” in the plaintiff's bill. An affirmative plea does not deny an allegation (thereby implicitly conceding the truth of the bill), but avoids the bill by asserting, for example, that the remedy is barred for some reason, such as because it would violate the Statute of Limitations. Langdell, A Summary of Equity Pleading [1877], 61-65.
113. A “fine” in conveyancing was the “amicable” resolution of a suit “by which the lands in question become, or are acknowledged to be, the right of one of the parties.” Black, A Dictionary of Law (1891), s. v. “fine.” The plea of fine here seems to be the defendant's claim that he owns the land by virtue of such a fine in the past. Fines were abolished in England by the time of this suit.
114. For example, a gloss refers (101a) to Cases on Sales (1872).
115. See, for example, the obituary of Ames in the Boston Herald (9 January 1910).
116. Ames, “Christopher Columbus Langdell,” 478.
117. The annotations from the 1890s pose the puzzling question as to why Ames would add lengthy annotations to a twenty-five-year-old casebook that had been superseded by a second edition in 1879 for a course that he never taught again after 1877. An equally puzzling question is why, having continued to gloss ACon71 after the 1879 edition appeared, Ames, as late as the 1890s, laboriously copied or paraphrased the glosses of the former into his copy of the latter, ACon79. These puzzles may be explained by the fact that Ames wrote several articles on the history of contract law in the 1890s and must have consulted his annotated copies of Langdell's casebooks in doing so. See “Parol Contracts Prior to Assumpsit,” Harvard Law Review 8 (1894): 252, reprinted in Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History by Various Authors, Compiled and Edited by a Committee of the Association of American Law Schools (Boston: Little, Brown, 1909) 2:304-19. See also “Two Theories of Consideration: Unilateral Contracts,” Harvard Law Review 12 (1899): 515; “Bilateral Contracts,” Harvard Law Review 13 (1899): 29; “Mutuality in Specific Performance,” Columbia Law Review 3 (1903): 1; “Specific Performance for and Against Strangers to the Contract,” Harvard Law Review 17 (1904): 174; all reprinted in Lectures on Legal History and Miscellaneous Legal Essays. In particular, “Bilateral Contracts” (1899) is cited by Ames in ACon79, 191a, 193a, 282a, 398a, 399a.
118. Langdell occasionally employed the term “Spiritual court” interchangeably with “ecclesiastical court,” which he considered to be the source of the procedure for courts of equity in England. Langdell, A Summary of Equity Pleading [1877], xiii.
119. The reference here is to Theophilus Parsons, The Law of Contract, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Boston, 1855), for which Langdell served as the primary research assistant during and following his own studies at Harvard Law School.
120. Hall, Letter to Francis S. Philbrick, 8 December 1925.
121. “Manuscript Book of Lecture Notes taken by an unidentified student in Suretyship class taught by C. C. Langdell in 1892-3,” 236.
122. Whittier, Letter to Francis S. Philbrick, 10 December 1925.
123. Hand, Letter to Francis S. Philbrick, 17 February 1926.
124. These words of Grant Gilmore are quoted affirmatively in Hoeflich, “Law & Geometry,” 121, n. 100.
125. John Stuart Mill, “Dr. Whewell's Objections to the Four Methods,” in A System of Logic. Ratiocinative and Inductive, 8th ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1874), 308.
126. Unpublished manuscript quoted in Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism, 76.
127. C. C. Langdell, “[Annual Report of the Dean of] The Law School,” in Annual Reports of the President and Treasurer of Harvard College, 1893-94, 121.
128. A Summary of Equity Pleading [1883], iv.
129. The absolute figures for these percentages are drawn from Langdell, “[Annual Report of the Dean of] The Law School [1893-94],” 121.
130. Eliot, Annual Reports of the President and the Treasurer of Harvard College, 1893-94, 23.
131. Charles W. Eliot, “Langdell and the Law School,” Howard Law Review 33 (1920): 525.
132. Upon resigning as dean, Langdell lost his secretary, and an item for “Reader to the Dane Professor” appeared in the Law School budget beginning in 1895-96. “Treasurer's Statement, 1896,” in Annual Reports of the President and Treasurer of Harvard College, 1895-96 (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1897), 63.
133. Schofield, “Christopher Columbus Langdell,” 277.
134. Beale, “Professor Langdell-His Later Teaching Days,” 9-10.
135. Ames, “Christopher Columbus Langdell,” 480.
136. “Christopher Columbus Langdell,”., 479, 481.
137. Batchelder also mentions Langdell's “bad eyesight” without relating it to his negative judgment about Langdell's teaching (308). Ironically, Batchelder later observes metaphorically that, in developing “the case-system of teaching law” “Langdell… was experimenting in darkness absolute save for his own mental illumination.” “C. C. Langdell, the Iconoclast,” 315.
138. Lee, Letter to Francis S. Philbrick, 18 February 1926.
139. “Extracts from Letters by Onetime students under Langdell and Ames, Relative to the Attitude of Those Teachers toward the Law,” mimeographed pamphlet in the file “Letters Received regarding Dean Ames, 1925-1926,” Box 1, Philbrick Papers, Harvard University Archives, Letter X.
140. Whittier, Letter to Francis S. Philbrick, 10 December 1925.
141. Fessenden, “The Rebirth of the Harvard Law School,” 514.
142. Mark Hollins, Understanding Blindess: An Integrative Approach (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989), 107.
143. Donald D. Kirtley, The Psychology of Blindness (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975), 144, 154. See, too, Berthold Lowenfeld, “Mental Hygiene of Blindness,” in Psychological Diagnosis and Counseling of the Adult Blind, ed. Wilma Donahue and Donald Dabelstein (New York: American Foundation for the Blind, 1950), 42-45.
144. Gilmore, The Death of Contract, 13.
145. Hoeflich, “Law & Geometry: Legal Science from Leibniz to Langdell,” 121, n. 100.
146. Jerome Frank, “A Plea for Lawyer Schools,” Yale Law Journal 56 (1947): 1303.
147. Quotation is from the observation: “Jerome Frank came within an ace of calling Langdell an emotional cripple who retreated into the library because he could not cope with the real world.” P. Stolz, “Clinical Experience in American Legal Education: Why Has It Failed?” in Clinical Education and the Law School of the Future, Resource Papers of the Conference [on law students in court] held… at the University of Chicago, ed. Edmund W. Kitch (Chicago: University of Chicago Law School, 1969), 72. See Frank, “Why Not a Clinical Lawyer-School,” 906-17; Anthony Chase, “The Birth of the Modern Law School,” American Journal of Legal History 23 (1979): 331, n. 11.