The Inception of Modern Professional Education

“Kimball’s rich description of academic life within Harvard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries adds to our understanding of Langdell’s career.” — The New England Quarterly

“[A] towering biography. . . . [Kimball’s] exceptional telling of this tale is a singular accomplishment.” — The Journal of Higher Education

“[A] highly readable biography. . . . Professors and professionals who want to understand the contours of their world will find [this work] illuminating.” — Harvard Law Review

“A masterful biography. . . . Meticulously researched. . . . An impressively rich account of Langdell’s life and legacy, and one which at the same time supplies fascinating insights into his contemporaries at Harvard. . . . There is much to commend this biography for both lawyers and educationists alike.” — Educational Review

“An excellent biography. . . . Mastery of the sources produced this remarkable book.” — Business History Review

“Historians with interests in legal history and higher education will benefit from reading this work.” — History of Education Quarterly

“In addition to illuminating the details of Langdell’s life, Kimball offers a fascinating narrative of the transformation of Harvard Law School during Langdell’s deanship, focusing on both the faculty and university administration as well as the students. Never before have we been able to follow in such detail the increasing demands Harvard Law School made upon its students. And never before has anyone even tried to get at the experience of being a law student at Langdell’s Harvard Law School — let alone succeeded the way Kimball does.” — William LaPiana, New York Law School

“Kimball provides all that one could have asked for in a biography of Langdell. This is a careful, sensitive rendering of the life of a very important legal educator. Kimball makes sense of Langdell’s innovations in legal education in terms of his experiences before teaching as well as his experiences when teaching and administering at Harvard. Wondrously, along the way Kimball unearths fascinating things about the nature of legal practice in New York City during the years surrounding the Civil War. He has pieced together reconstructions of what took place in the early Socratic classroom as well as what law student life was like. These are extraordinary gifts to historians.” — John Henry Schlegel, University at Buffalo Law School