Summary Of Christopher Columbus Langdell

The writing of Christopher Columbus Langdell illustrates a strong defense of the current mandatory legal education. His talks and perspectives were the basis for an entire generation of upcoming lawyers and, for better or for worse, changed how the legal education system works by doing away with the accessibility of being a part of the legal system. By making law a “science”, Langdell was able to better educate the upcoming lawyers and legal professionals of his time. However there were major proponents for the Langdell style of teachings. One of those people being Duncan Kennedy. Kennedy had glaring and obvious issues in the current law system, such as the law schools teaching benefiting the well off and other select parts of society, all …show more content…
The professor’s sole purpose is to educate the upcoming legal professionals into their future roles. This also relays into the control system the legal professionals have put in place in order to better control their populace. During their time at the institution, the students have preordained courses that better help them pursue their goals and allows for them to have a clear path on where to go to achieve that future. At the end of each course year, the students must each take an annual examination and the first years must pass their first examination in order to continue at the university. This is even more so to control the populace of legal professionals by weeding out the one’s not capable of fitting the course …show more content…
Kennedy show in his work, Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy, that the legal education system has major flaws that needs to be addressed, especially in the first year of education. Kennedy showed that in the very first year students are put into a highly competitive environment where many students believing, either consciously or not, that their success at law school will access them with social mobility. Kennedy states that “everyone whose parents were not members of the professional/technical intelligentsia seems to feel that law school is an advance in terms of the family history (Kennedy 39)”. This shows that a percentage of the student populace have impure motives when it comes to them being at the school. This shows that not everyone at law schools are there for the betterment of society as a whole. The next issue is the racial aspect within the school. An overwhelming amount of the teacher population on most law schools is white, male, straight, and middle class. What happens in a situations where an institution has an enormous demographic of is that the minorities must assimilate to their ways, in order to have a better experience. According to Kennedy, “teachers offer subtle encouragements and not-so-subtle reasons for alarm (Kennedy 40).” They control and narrow their ways of thinking creating this one uniform way of thinking. This contributes to the obvious forms of