a beginners' work published in 1818: 'the first principles of the science are
obscured by their bulk . . . Every science has its rudiments; and the law, like a
river which never runs back to its source, expands and deepens in its current,
and grows more and more arduous to fathom.' Versions of the theory of legal
science underpinned the nineteenth-century flowering of the practice of writing
legal treatises, which claimed to set out, explain, illustrate, and systematize the
basic principles of different branches of the law, and, if possible, enunciate
clearly the rules of law which could be derived from them. ⁷ In the reports of
cases extending back into the Middle Ages could be found both authority and
illustration of the principles and rules of law, as well as examples of situations
in which the judges, who were human and fallible, had made occasional mis-
takes in the task of refinement and application.

A version of legal science became associated with the Harvard Law School
where, in the 1870s, Christopher Columbus Langdell, who had become Dane
Professor on 6 January 1870, and Dean in the following September, pioneered
the case system of instruction, which came to dominate legal education in
American law schools. Langdell believed that:

the number of fundamental legal doctrines is much less than is commonly supposed; the
many different guises in which the same doctrine is constantly making its appearance,
and the great extent to which legal treatises are a repetition of each other, being the cause
of much misapprehension. ⁸

He thought that law students, if given a selection of leading cases to study in
class under the supervision of a professor, could be trained to become legal
scientists themselves, learning how to tease out the principles from the cases,
and how to apply them to the complex disputes which were presented to courts
in litigation.

Langdell did not however invent the idea of publishing collections of 'leading
cases'. It was suggested by Samuel Warren, best known for his novel Ten
Thousand a Year. He also published A Popular and Practical Introduction to
Law Studies ( 1835), a work designed 'to smooth the rugged access to legal
science'. ⁹ In it, as he later wrote, he had extolled the value to the law student
and practitioner 'of early mastery, as so many nuclei of future legal acquisitions,
a few of the "leading cases" in the Law Reports'. ¹⁰ He assured his student

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