Langdell on Contracts and Legal Reasoning: Correcting the Holmesian Caricature

Abstract

During the first decade of his tenure as dean of Harvard Law School (HLS) from 1870 to 1895, Christopher C. Langdell (1826–1906) produced closely related works on contracts and sales that exercised great influence pedagogically and jurisprudentially. Pedagogically, the casebooks on contracts and sales introduced case method teaching into American legal education. In jurisprudential terms, these works placed Langdell with Frederick Pollock and William R. Anson in England and Oliver W. Holmes, Jr., in the United States, as the leading theorists of contract during its “golden age” of “overwhelming predominance” in Anglo-American law.