Christopher C. Langdell

Christopher Columbus Langdell, who lived from May 22, 1826 to July 6, 1906, was an American jurist and legal academic who was Dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1895. As a professor and administrator he pioneered the casebook method of instruction, which has since been widely adopted in American law schools and adapted for other professional disciplines such as business, public policy and education. He applied the principles of pragmatism to the teaching of law, so that students were compelled to use their own reasoning to understand how the law might apply in a given case, a process that came to be called the case method.