N O pencils, no more more books? Changes in Legal Education By Jennie Bricker On the first day of his first-year contracts class, Harvard Law professor Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. humiliates a student for being unable to recite the facts of a case. Before his one-L peers, Kingsfield grills “Mr. Hart” mercilessly and dispassionately. That scene, from the 1973 movie, “The Paper Chase,” could almost have been a centennial celebration of the birth of the venerable “Socratic” and casebook method of legal instruction. The method had its debut in a real-life contracts class at Harvard Law School, in the fall of 1870. The newly appointed law school dean, Professor Christopher Columbus Langdell, opened his lecture by asking a student, Mr. Fox, to state the facts in Payne v. Cave. Following Mr. Fox’s recitation, Professor Langdell called upon Mr. Rawle to summarize the plaintiff’s argument. The professor then turned to Mr. Adams to ask whether he agreed. 1 iStock Professor Langdell’s innovative method fostered open hostility and mass defection: By the end of fall term only seven students remained in his contracts class. 2 From 1870 through 1873, Harvard Law School enrollment plummeted from 165 students to 117, prompting Boston University to open a competing law school. 3 But Langdell persisted in his method, served as Harvard Law dean until 1895, and left his imprint on virtually every law school classroom — as “the method of extracting law from cases by means of the Socratic method became the norm of modern legal education.” 4 AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2016 • OREGON STATE BAR BULLETIN 19