IX
C. C. Langdell, Iconoclast
At the Harvard Law School in the late sixties things were going pretty comfortably. That great triumvirate, Parker, Parsons, and Washburn, were still the instructors. One of them lectured for a couple of hours every day. The list of textbooks they covered each half-year—some twenty-five or thirty in each course—was rather appalling to a conscientious student who tried to read them all. Very few tried, and fewer succeeded. The lectures were quite enough. Such of the students as attended them and did not read a newspaper meanwhile might hear in a pleasant, informal way the rule of law on almost any given point. Such of them as attended, or at any rate paid their term-bills, for eighteen months, received the LL.B. as a sort of reward of constancy.
To an occasionally expressed doubt of the actual legal ability represented by such a degree the answer was ready: “Can’t you take the word of a gentleman that he has learned the law?” To the same effect was the weight of authority and respectable antiquity. There had been no advance since the dictum of Dr. Johnson, a hundred years before:—
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