ABSTRACT
When Christopher Columbus Langdell founded the law school curriculum that we teach, Jim Crow flourished. Women could not vote. The Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution to invalidate worker protections, but not racial apartheid. In that backwards era, more than 125 years ago, Langdell established our familiar first-year curriculum consisting of courses examining appellate cases in Property, Contracts, Torts, Civil Procedure, and Criminal Law.
Today, our law schools continue to graduate lawyers whose required course of study inscribes nineteenth century notions, categories, and values. Is this really the right foundational curriculum for today’s lawyers?
This Essay explores the origins and constraints of today’s foundational curriculum; analyzes the staying power of that curriculum; describes a workshop we organized to explore ways to free ourselves from Langdell; and presents five proposals for new starting places in the required law school curriculum. Workshop participants generated four of these proposals about what law students should learn first, giving those foundational courses these titles: The Police; American Indian Law in the United States; Solving People’s Problems; and Broken Promises. The fifth proposal for how to start, Families and Work, is our own.
We have not catalogued all the flaws in the Langdellian curriculum, nor have we fully imagined all the possibilities for a new program of legal education. The task of curricular redesign and implementation falls to law professors and faculties who are committed to rethinking legal education in collaboration with great lawyers. We intend this Essay to be a provocation and invitation.
Angelos, Claudia and Bilek, Mary Lu and Howarth, Joan W. and Merritt, Deborah Jones, Langdell’s Subjects (September 15, 2024), 102 University of Detroit Mercy Law Review 1 (2024); Ohio State Legal Studies Research Paper No 897.
Leave a Reply