Christopher Columbus Langdell

Christopher Columbus Langdell lived from May 22, 1826 to July 6, 1906 and was an American jurist and legal academic who served as Dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1895. As a professor and administrator he pioneered the casebook method of instruction, which has since been widely adopted in American law schools and adapted for other professional disciplines such as business, public policy, and education. He has been called arguably the most influential teacher in the history of professional education in the United States. Before his tenure, the study of law was a technical pursuit in which students were simply told what the law is; Langdell instead compelled students to use their own reasoning to understand how the law might apply in a given case, a dialectical process that came to be called the case method and has remained the primary method of teaching at American law schools since.