Ever since the remote day when human beings began to live together in society, official organs of the state have been charged with the responsbility of deciding disputes between individuals who belong to the community (or are at all events temporarily within it) as well as disputes between individuals and the state. From the beginning of social time there have been institutions like courts which have generated or excreted law or something like law. In all societies beyond the most primitive a professional class of lawyers and judges has emerged and maintained itself. In most societies at most periods the...

English law was the only law that post-Revolutionary American lawyers knew anything about. A few had studied law in England. Most had received whatever training they had in this country—by serving as apprentices in law offices or by studying at the law schools which began to spring up toward the end of the eighteenth century. But the only available sources were English sources—from the crabbed and incomprehensible pages of Coke on Littleton to the elegant superficialities of Blackstone. Collections of English cases enjoyed a wide sale—either imported from London or republished here with (as time went on)...

My description of American law before the Civil War sounded like a romp through the Garden of Eden. Wherever we went we paused to admire the happy sight of great judges deciding great cases greatly, aware of the lessons of the past but conscious of the needs of the future, striking a sensitive balance between the conflicting claims of local automony and national uniformity in an immense, diverse, and rapidly growing country, creating a new law for a new land. Only the issue of slavery, which cast an ever-lengthening shadow, disturbed the tranquillity of the scene.

When we turn to...

All Ages of Faith may well be of brief duration. The pleasant and comforting myth of the law’s internal consistency and external stability cannot, for long, sustain itself. The facts of life cannot, for long, be suppressed. Every Blackstone must have his Bentham; every Langdell must have his Llewellyn. The specifics of the breakdown, like the specifics of the original construction, are determined by the accidents of time and place.

From the vantage point of the 1970s it is clear enough that the great structure of Langdellian jurisprudence crumbled during the period between the two World Wars. It did not,...

For two hundred years we have been in thrall to the eighteenth-century hypothesis that there are, in social behavior and in societal development, patterns which recur in the same way that they appear to recur in the physical universe.¹ If the hypothesis is sound, it must follow that, once the relevant developmental sequences which have led us to our present state have been correctly analyzed, we will know not only where we are but where we are going. Our understanding of the present will enable us to predict the future and, within limits, to control it. Once the forces at...