I write with the reserve proper to one who is considering an educational policy of which he has had no personal experience, but it seems to me that, in the last analysis, Professor Langdell's new idea was this: to rouse, develop, discipline and cultivate the judgment, and so, as far as possible, to equip each student with that valuable attribute, easily recognized but hard to define or describe, which is called a legal mind. It is judgment that does it. A mechanic of good judgment is already half a lawyer; an attorney of poor judgment will always remain in the apprentice class.
I am reminded how I first saw Langdell's name. After I left the Law School I was for a time a member of the New York Bar. As I went upstairs to my office at No. 16 Wall street, I would see above me, at the top of the next flight, the sign of a law firm, Pierrepont, Stanley & Langdell. I knew about Pierrepont, who was a Yale man of the class of 1837, and I somehow got the idea, perhaps unjust to Mr. Pierrepont, that one of the junior partners was an erudite man who acted as purveyor of legal ideas to the head of the firm, somewhat as Sydney Carton did for Mr. Stryver in "A Tale of Two Cities." The selection of Mr. Langdell as a professor was due to the sagacity of President Eliot.
An interesting and valuable part of the History is a biographical list of the ninety-one men who were teachers in the School during the century covered by the book. One of the names is that of Justice Francis J. Swayze, of the New Jersey Supreme Court, who began in the Centennial year, 1917, a course of lectures on Legal Ethics, which he continues.
I now go back to my own time at the Law School. There was a small Jersey group there. Nehemiah Perry, Henry Young, Job H. Lippincott, Abram Q. Garretson and John R. Emery were men who, like Othello, "have done the State some service." When Vice-Chancellor Emery passed away, I became the only survivor of the little company.
Professor Joel Parker, as I knew him, was a courteous gentleman of the old school, sixty-nine years of age, _tenax propositi_ public-spirited, courageous and combative, who had established a high reputation as a jurist by his opinions as Chief Justice of New Hampshire for fifteen years. As a conservative Whig he had supported the Compromises of 1850, but presided over a meeting of the citizens of Cambridge, held June 2, 1856, to denounce the assault on Senator Sumner. The conclusion of his speech on that occasion showed the mettle of the man. "For myself, personally, I am perhaps known to most of you as a peaceful citizen, reasonably conservative, devotedly attached to the Constitution, and much too far advanced in life for gasconade; but, under present circumstances, I may be pardoned for saying that some of my father's blood was shed on Bunker Hill, at the commencement of one revolution, and that there is a little more of the same sort left, if it shall prove necessary, for the beginning of another." The Professor had a true instinct. The attack on Senator Sumner was the first act of civil war; the John Brown raid the second; the firing on Fort Sumpter the third.