...natural, deep, and enduring learning occurs when we act collaboratively to solve problems...
Beginning in 1870, Charles Eliot, then president of Harvard University, and Christopher Columbus Langdell, the dean of Harvard's law faculty, transformed the law school classroom from a lecture hall in which professors announced legal principles to a laboratory in which students were called on to interpret and apply principles they had uncovered by reading primary legal texts (constitutions, statutes, regulations, and, most often, judicial opinions). In what became variously known as Socratic, or Langdellian, or case method classes, law students were pulled out of their passive silence. They could not become professionals by sitting and listening. They would learn to be professionals by doing one of the most important kinds of work that legal professionals do: constructing and arguing interpretations of existing legal texts in response to new questions or situations. Students were not told what the law became after an opinion was announced or a legal rule was enacted; they were invited to interpret the law in light of questions the opinion-writer did not confront or situations that legislators may not have contemplated.
This activation of the law school classroom was prescient, for it was based on theories about human learning that were new in the Langdellian era, but are now widely accepted. The core idea, most famously championed in the United States by John Dewey, is that natural, deep, and enduring learning occurs when we act collaboratively to solve problems. Its corollary in legal education is that students understand law more completely when they work together to puzzle out how law will constrain or facilitate human action.