Christopher Columbus Langdell (whose career ended a century ago) achieved fame by devising the case method to turn law into a laboratory science divorced from politics and to make his course so rigorous that it would attract able students seeking to test and prove themselves with the severest academic challenge. The method was adapted by many law teachers who were unpersuaded by the idea of law as apolitical science. These included Langdell's colleagues, James Bradley Thayer and John Chipman Gray, who shared Holmes's disdain for the theory. The method survived and flourished despite its theoretical weakness because it worked in practice. No mere rite of passage, it developed numerous traits and skills useful to lawyers, it revealed a true picture of the political and atomized nature of American law, and it nurtured many of the civic virtues that American law teachers have sought to nurture since the time of George Wythe.

Sociologists lack clarity and consensus about their scholarly mission. Some are purely and coldly scientific, some morally or politically critical, and some warmly or sentimentally humanistic. Their ultimate concerns include the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Others are not explicit or even self-conscious about what they seek to accomplish, and still others combine various styles—scientific, critical, and humanistic—and are difficult or impossible to classify at all. Their discourse is cacophonous. The utterances of some are uninteresting to others, and their assessments of one another commonly seem completely misdirected.