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THE GREEN BAG
over, the cases were obscured by countless extraneous facts and confusing details. The law, pure and undefiled, was not in them. Now Co. Litt., or Justinian, if you liked. . . Simultaneously with the publication of "Cases on Contracts" two other bombs fell into the ranks of the old guard. The scientific man at the head of the University put this scientific man at the head of the Law School, creating for him the position of dean! And both these scientific men, exact investigators, proposed that the attain ments of all students should be exactly investigated before being certified by a degree! The prospectus of the school for 1870-71 contained for the first time the strangely disquieting announcement, that "examinations, of a thorough and searching character" would be held at the close of that year. "Each instructor," further said the prospectus, "will adopt such mode of teaching the subjects of which he has charge as in his judgment will best advance the pupil in his course." Thus was the new system officially baptized and received into the university fold. The day came for its first trial. The class gathered in the old amphitheatre of Dane Hall — the one lecture room of the School — and opened their strange new pamphlets, re ports bereft of their only useful part, the head-notes! The lepturer opened his. "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. What would be said to-day if some obscure lawyer from a distant city, without even his college degree, should arrive at the school and to its distinguished staff say in effect, "Your
teaching is all wrong — inefficient, second hand, obsolete. I have a new method that in the course of a generation or so will put your lectures about on a par with those of the University of Pekin!" Moreover, a change of instruction at the Harvard Law School to-day would be backed with ample funds, aided with every modern device, received with the open mind of the truth-seeker, and tried by a phenomenally able corps of teachers on a picked body of students whose intellectual average prob ably exceeds that of any other body of students in the world. Langdell had none of these advantages. He was experimenting in darkness absolute save for his own mental illumination. He had no prestige, no assis tants, no precedents, the slenderest of appa ratus, and for the most part an unpromising corpus vile. He was the David facing a complacent Goliath of unshaken legal tradi tion reinforced by social and literary preju dice. His attempts were met with the open hostility, if not of the other instructors, cer tainly of the bulk of the students. His first lectures were followed by impromptu in dignation 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 t" Did the new lecturer himself know the law? He apparently took back in one lec ture what he had said in the last. Young Warner, a keen logician (and one of the first converts to the new system) cornered him squarely one day, amidst a hurricane of derisive clapping and stamping. "Would it be believed, "the old crank" went back to the same point next day and worked it out all over again! Most of the class could see nothing in his system but mental con fusion and social humiliation. They began to drop away fast. A little group, the ablest men of the class (most of the names have been mentioned above), — "Kit's freshmen" they were dubbed — discerned there was something here better than the text-book lectures,
