Langdell, Eliot, and the Rise of Blogging
posted by Nate Oman
I, alas, missed the discussion and fireworks at the
AALS’s session on blogging, but it does strike me that blogs are a very nice illustration of one of the basic dilemmas that the legal academy faces. The American law school as a post-graduate institution staffed by specialized academics focused on research and publishing is a creation of Christopher Columbus Langdell and the Harvard Law School of the 1870s through 1900. It is no accident that the American law school came out of Harvard during this period. Langdell was hired by Harvard president Charles Eliot, who perhaps did as much as any other person to set the patterns of higher education in modern America. Eliot, in turn, was modeling Harvard — which became the model for America — on the great German research institutions of the 19th century. Hence, it was Eliot who pushed the notion of the Ph.D. as the necessary precondition for professorhood, and valorized disciplHTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:45:20 GMT Server: Apache X-Pingback: http://www.concurringopinions.com/xmlrpc.php Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
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