Christopher Columbus Langdell

Christopher Columbus Langdell was an American legal scholar and Harvard Law School dean who developed case-method teaching and helped shape law as an academic discipline.

Case method: A teaching approach in which students study judicial opinions and derive legal principles through analysis. Langdell made close analysis of reported cases the center of legal instruction.
Casebook: A collection of edited legal cases assembled for study in a course. Langdell’s 1871 collection organized appellate opinions as the primary course text.
Joseph Story: An American jurist and Harvard law professor who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1812 to 1845. Story’s influential teaching and scholarship shaped Harvard legal education before Langdell’s reforms.
American Bar Association: A national voluntary professional organization for lawyers in the United States, founded in 1878. The association later promoted standards for legal education in a profession Langdell helped reshape.
Socratic method: A teaching practice that uses questions and answers to test and develop understanding. Langdell used classroom questioning to make students articulate principles drawn from cases.
Hearsay: An out-of-court statement offered in court to prove the truth of what it asserts. Langdell’s casebook on evidence used judicial opinions to examine doctrines such as hearsay.
Harvard University: A private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1636. The university setting gave Langdell a platform to recast law as an academic discipline.
Legal realism: A movement in American jurisprudence that emphasizes how social conditions and judicial behavior shape law in practice. Legal realists challenged the view that legal outcomes follow from doctrine alone.
Legal formalism: An approach that treats legal decisions as derivable from established rules and concepts through disciplined reasoning. Langdell’s account of law as a science is often associated with formalist reasoning.
Legal doctrine: A body of legal principles and rules developed through legislation, judicial decisions, and legal practice. Students were expected to infer doctrinal principles by comparing judicial opinions.

Linked from 5 pages