THE LEGITIMACY TRAP.

Students entering law school today will have an educational experience strikingly similar to that of those who entered in the late 1800s. What will be their required courses? Torts, contracts, civil procedure, property, and criminal law. What will they read? Appellate opinions. How will their professors teach? By deploying the Socratic method. How will they be tested? With a hypo exam. This Article argues that the belief that these practices are the legitimate means by which to teach students "how to think like a lawyer" is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of their origins. The casebook, the 1L curriculum, the Socratic method, and the hypo exam are all entailments of Christopher Langdell's nineteenth-century strategy to elevate the status of law schools by reimagining them as institutions where students would learn to think not like lawyers, but like scientists. Aiming to cash in on the acclaim of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, Langdell modeled the study of law after Darwin's study of organisms. Like Darwin, law students would study with an evolutionary eye. The judicial opinion would be their specimen; the classroom, their workshop; and the library, their laboratory. Although initially lambasted by the legal community, the model spread because it was preferred by corporate law firms. White-shoe partners commonly observed that students trained under Langdell's methods did not possess much useful knowledge about the law. However, they believed that the social Darwinism embedded in his model could be exploited to the firms' financial benefit. High failure rates, stressful classroom environments, and a do-ityourself method of study mirrored the "up-or-out" Darwinian culture at corporate law firms. Receipt of a Langdellian education indicated that a young lawyer would be able to endure the grueling life of a junior associate. Partners' preference for students trained under the model transformed Harvard Law from a middling institution to a financial powerhouse whose educational practices would be mimicked by law schools nationwide. Today, law schools aim to be welcoming and inclusive, yet they default to an educational model that was designed to intimidate and exclude. By clinging to centuries-old educational precedent, law schools miseducate future lawyers and maintain stubborn cultures of alienation and anxiety within their halls. This Article identifies key shortcomings of the dominant model of legal education and recommends actions that will allow new models to flourish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]