The story of the development of the Harvard Law School after 1870, and of American legal education as a whole, is commonly presented as a straightforward example of charismatic leadership. In that year Christopher Columbus Langdell was appointed professor and shortly afterwards was elected Dean of the Harvard Law School. He was responsible for a number of innovations, the best known being the case method of instruction. Langdell's approach was based on a coherent but simple theory of law teaching, which he applied with consistency and determination. This theory provided the basis for an educational orthodoxy which underlies much of modern American legal education. It is arguable that in the hundred years that followed Langdell's appointment there have been few radical changes in American legal education, despite numerous attempts at innovation and experiment. The fundamentals of the Langdellian orthodoxy survived to a remarkable degree periodic bouts of dissatisfied introspection on the part of law teachers, and it was only in the late 1960s that the combination of racial tension, student unrest, the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam threatened to rock the established order in some leading law schools.

Presented thus, the story does less than justice to the richness and complexity of developments in American legal education between 1870 and 1970 But it is useful as a device for dramatizing the conflict of ideas that underlies the realist controversy. In so far as legal realism was in the first instance a reaction against an approach to law that was characterized as ‘formalism’, Langdell can be treated as a leading representative of this approach.