In both the United States and Western Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, forensic physicians engaged in bitter jurisdictional disputes with members of well-established legal professions, within the context of long-standing judicial institutions. In Russia, by contrast, the emergent medical and legal professions—both critical of the autocracy and state institutions in which they worked—joined forces in their attempts to fundamentally transform the autocratic system and its judicial institutions, based on claims of technical and professional expertise. As such, the development of forensic-medical expertise took a path that differed from the Western model. In Russia, forensic physicians reacted to and influenced the evolution of bureaucratic state structures. Consequently, medical professionals sought to increase—rather than minimize—their role within the state's legal system in order to transform an otherwise arbitrary judicial process along the lines of “scientific rationality” and “objectivity.”

Shortly after 3 P.M. on February 27, 1888, Eddie Dwyer, one of the young employees at Greene's Boot Heel Factory in Chicago, began to clear empty sacks out of a closet in the rear of the factory so that coal could be loaded into the room. After pulling out roughly five sacks, Eddie called out that there seemed to be something else in the closet. Investigation established that the something else was the body of another employee, fourteen-year-old Maggie Gaughan, who had been missing all day and apparently had been hacked to death with the hatchet found beneath her body. Suspicion quickly centered on the factory foreman, a seventeen-year-old African American named Zephyr Davis, who was away from the factory on an errand at the time the body was discovered. That suspicion became certainty when Davis did not return from the errand, driven away, as he later admitted, by the crowds he saw gathered outside of Greene's when he returned.

Christopher Columbus Langdell (1826–1906) was perhaps the most influential figure in the history of legal education in the United States. He shaped the modern law school by introducing a number of significant reforms during his tenure as dean of Harvard Law School (HLS) from 1870 to 1895. Indeed, Langdell may well be the most influential figure in the history of American professional education because he established at HLS, with the help of President Charles W. Eliot, the model for twentieth-century professional schools. His innovations—such as minimum academic standards for admission to degree candidacy, a graded and sequential curriculum, minimum academic standards for continuation in a degree program, a professorial career track for faculty members, and the transformation of the library from a textbook repository into a scholarly resource—became the norm to which leading law schools, medical schools, and, finally, schools of other professions in the twentieth century aspired. Among these changes, none is more closely associated with Langdell than the introduction of case method teaching.

The amount of ink spilled in consideration of the life, thought, accomplishments, and legacy of Christopher Columbus Langdell is eloquent testimony to the critical role he plays in the self-image of the American law teaching profession. It is both wonderful and astounding, therefore, to find that critical primary sources remained unread and unused at the very end of the twentieth century. Now that Bruce Kimball has brought them to light, we have a more complete view of the man and his thought, one that, not surprisingly, reveals to us someone quite different from the cruelly and crudely caricatured inventor of those twin devices for stifling young minds, the case and Socratic methods.

When historians focus on an influential figure, they often do one of two things: either create a biographical portrait of the person, or explain the contribution that the person has made to the development of ideas or institutions. In the case of Langdell, most writers have chosen the latter course, at least partly out of a conviction that the man himself was simply not very interesting.

As one who has suggested in print that Christopher Columbus Langdell was a loony, I am singularly pleased that Bruce Kimball has so carefully demonstrated that Kit was a regular guy just trying to teach his classes and learn some law. But this observation seems to me to be not particularly relevant to the debate about Langdell that I have mostly watched, but occasionally commented on. I shall try to recreate that debate as best I can, to show where it stands, and so, to identify where an understanding of Langdell's teaching places us.

William LaPiana has led the way in searching for, identifying, and examining new evidence about Langdell, so it is gratifying to learn that he is informed by my revisions of Langdell's bibliography, teaching schedule, and career chronology. LaPiana also affirms the significance of Langdell's early lectures on partnership and commercial paper, adding informative points both about Langdell's views and their possible influence on others. However, the reconstructions of discussions from Langdell's classes are speculative, in LaPiana's judgment, and to some extent superfluous, because “one can certainly concede the point [that the Dean was not ‘dogmatic, rigid, and closeminded‘] even without resorting to the reconstructed discussions.”

The legal and social implications of Hardwicke's Marriage Act, passed in 1753, were of the utmost importance in England. From 1754 onwards a marriage, in order to be recognized as legal, had to be carried out in a very specific, circumscribed manner, ending a period during which “irregular” or clandestine marriages proliferated. Although Lord Hardwicke had been agitating for such legislation for years, it was one case in particular, a Scottish action, which had been appealed to the House of Lords, that precipitated the Act.