Later he formed a partnership, chiefly for commercial law, with William Stanley and Addison Brown, afterwards United States District Judge, with Honorable Edwards Pierrepont of counsel, afterwards Attorney-General of the United States and Minister to England. Among these distinguished seniors, Langdell was only the modest, quiet student, always in his office, always at work, living frugally, and still retaining his awkward, countrified manners.[1]
But when the Dane professorship at Harvard became vacant, the great head of the University, who had known and appreciated Langdell in undergraduate days, sought him out for the chair. Himself a scientific man, he was ready to subscribe to the proposition that the law is a science. He accepted, too, the corollaries—that law must be studied from the original sources, namely, the reports, and must be taught by men who have so studied it, irrespective of their practice of it; as geology is better studied on the hillside than in the parlor, and better taught by a geologist than by a stone-mason.
So Langdell came to teach at the Law School as a king comes into his own. His first term, the spring term of 1870, was not memorable. He lectured on partner-
- ↑ One of the clique of courtly old professors at the Law School observed privately that the beginning of the new régime would not have been so hard “if Langdell had only been a gentleman.”
