...the dirty work of practice was not thought suitable for serious study, and The Law consistently eclipsed Lawyering as the focus of legal education...
Unfortunately, the central role that active, experiential learning plays in the Langdellian case method was dimly understood, even by many of Langdell’s champions. The method came in an incongruous package of reforms. An emphasis on formalism gave school-based learning much of its status and appeal. Professional training in an academic setting was associated with predictable, sequenced, and measured achievement, and therefore with the admissions requirements, fixed curricula, and proficiency examinations that Langdell also introduced at Harvard Law. Rote learning is easy to measure, because its content is fixed. One can say with more certainty whether a fact has been recalled than whether an interpretation or judgment is sound. As proponents of the case method fashioned questions for classroom discussion, or the more consequential final examinations, the goal of forcing students to think under questioning was in tension with the goal of making the law school experience predictable and measurable. Pondering a professor’s question became less a matter of genuine inquiry and more a matter of filling blanks in thoughts the professor had already completed. Instead of being called on to think, students felt called on to guess what a professor wanted to hear.
Langdellian reforms also included reimagining the law school professoriate. Langdell was an experienced but disillusioned practitioner who found satisfaction and solace in academic life. When he entered the legal academy, law school professors were, for the most part, successful practitioners who taught part-time. Langdell worked assiduously to build a full time faculty. Perhaps because of his own disillusionment with practice, Langdell took this sensible reform to extremes. He insisted that practice experience impaired rather than enriched one’s development as a teacher and scholar and built his faculty on the assumption that the best law professors were people who had excelled as law students but remained innocent of the realities of practice. This Langdellian position reinforced a theory-practice stratification that is common among the professions. The dirty work of practice was not thought suitable for serious study, and The Law consistently eclipsed Lawyering as the focus of legal education.
As a result, learning how to practice the law is too often deferred to post-graduate employment. A delay in client-readiness ensues. Deferred practice also poses another problem. It rests on the assumption that learning from experience is a natural byproduct of exposure to legal tasks, rather than a strategic approach to learning that maximizes the benefits of shared challenge, mentorship, and deliberate critique.