Christopher Langdell was born in the town of
New Boston, New Hampshire, of English and
Scots-Irish ancestry. He studied at
Phillips Exeter Academy in 1845–48, at
Harvard College in 1848–50 and at
Harvard Law School in 1851–54. As a student, he served as one of the Harvard Law School's first librarians. From 1854 to 1870 he practiced law in
New York City. In January 1870 he received an invitation from
Charles Eliot to take up the chair of Dane Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Langdell accepted the offer and soon after became
Dean of the Law Faculty, succeeding
Theophilus Parsons, to whose
Treatise on the Law of Contracts (1853) he had contributed as a student. As Dean he introduced sweeping changes to the curriculum of the Law school, extending the length of the academic programme from one to three years and replacing the old-style lecture system with a new system of tuition which required a significantly greater level of engagement and input from students. He rejected the tradition in English-speaking countries of learning law by professional apprenticeship, in favor of the European tradition of a university education. He insisted that law teaching had to be supported by an extensive law library, for "law is a science" and "all the available materials of that science are contained in printed books". He was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1870 and received the degree of
LL.D. in 1875. Langdell resigned the deanship in 1895, in 1900 became Dane Professor Emeritus, and on July 6, 1906, died in
Cambridge. In 1903 a chair in the law school was named in his honor and after his death the school's primary academic building, housing both the world's largest academic law library and classrooms, was named
Langdell Hall. Langdell made the Harvard Law School a success by remodeling its administration. In a private correspondence of April 13, 1915,
Charles W. Eliot wrote: "the putting of Langdell in charge of the Law School was the best piece of work I did for Harvard University, except the reconstruction of the Medical school in [18]70 and [18]71, and the long fight for the development of the elective system." ==Influence on legal teaching==