“‘Mr. Fox, will you state the facts in the case of Payne v. Cave?’

“Mr. Fox did his best with the facts of the case.

“‘Mr. Rawle, will you give the plaintiff’s argument?’

“Mr. Rawle gave what he could of the plaintiff’s argument.

“‘Mr. Adams, do you agree with that?’

“And the case-system of teaching law had begun.... Consider the man’s courage.... Langdell was experimenting in darkness absolute save for his own mental illumination. He had no prestige, no assistants, no precedents, the slenderest of apparatus, and for the most part an uncompromising corpus vile. He was the David facing a complacent Goliath of unshaken legal tradition, reinforced by social and literary prejudice. His attempts were met with the open hostility, if not of the other instructors, certainly of the bulk of the students. His first lectures were followed by impromptu indignation meetings. ‘What do we care whether Myers agrees with the case, or what Fessenden thinks of the dissenting opinion? What we want to know is: “What’s the law?”’

“A controversy at once sprang up as to the efficacy of this method of instruction. To most of the students, as well as to Langdell’s colleagues, it was abomination. The students cut his lectures; only a few remained. But these few were the seed of the new School. They included several men who afterward attained national reputation: James Barr Ames, his greatest pupil and successor; Franklin G. Fessenden, member of the Superior Court of Massachusetts; Austen G. Fox, a leader of the New York Bar; Edward Q. Keasbey, of New Jersey; James J. Myers, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and one of the leaders of the Boston Bar; and Francis Rawle of Philadelphia, a President of the American Bar Association. Working out his cases with these enthusiastic young men, patiently and thoroughly as he always worked, Langdell did nothing to force upon others the acceptance of his system. In a few years Ames was appointed to the Faculty, and brought youth, fire, virility into the contest; but for many years the two were alone in their use of the new method. It was ten years before others acceded to it.”

The fact was that something had to be done. The School was on the down grade. I state this no more strongly than the History does at pages 21 to 25. This was the natural result, I think, of an extremely inefficient method of instruction. Nothing could be less effective than a series of lectures which no one was bound to attend, without recitations or examinations, so that it was possible for a student to receive his degree after a year and a half of residence without learning any law. Such a system might do for very zealous and ambitious students, but not for a large class. That the School held up its head as long as it did was due to two things: the genius loci, which counted for a good deal, and the personal influence and example of the professors, who were superior men.

I write with the reserve proper to one who is considering an educational policy of which he has had no personal experience, but it seems to me that, in the last analysis, Professor Langdell’s new idea was this: to rouse, develop, discipline and cultivate the judgment, and so, as far as possible, to equip each student with that valuable attribute, easily recognized but hard to define or describe, which is called a legal mind. It is judgment that does it. A mechanic of good judgment is already half a lawyer; an attorney of poor judgment will always remain in the apprentice class.

I am reminded how I first saw Langdell’s name. After I left the Law School I was for a time a member of the New York Bar. As I went upstairs to my office at No. 16 Wall street, I would see above me, at the top of the next flight, the sign of a law firm, Pierrepont, Stanley & Langdell. I knew about Pierrepont, who was a Yale man of the class of 1837, and I somehow got the idea, perhaps unjust to Mr. Pierrepont, that one of the junior partners was an erudite man who acted as purveyor of legal ideas to the head of the firm, somewhat as Sydney Carton did for Mr. Stryver in “A Tale of Two Cities.” The selection of Mr. Langdell as a professor was due to the sagacity of President Eliot.