Modern Legal Times: Making a Professional Legal Culture

In the legal profession we like certain beginnings, and it is almost too easy to date the beginnings of the modern legal profession from 1870. Hubbell’s Legal Directory was just one year old. The first written bar examinations were introduced in 1870. The Albany Law Journal was first published on January 8, 1870. That same month, Charles Eliot, the new President of Harvard University, appointed an 1854 graduate of the law school named Christopher Columbus Langdell to the faculty. On February 1, the first meeting of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York was held. In the summer of 1870, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was named co-editor of the American Law Review, and began his systematic study of jurisprudence resulting ten years later in the publication of The Common Law. In the fall, Langdell was named to the newly created post of Dean at the Harvard Law School. When Langdell began his Fall 1870 contracts class by asking, "Mr. Fox, please state the facts in Bryan v. Cave ," the modern legal profession was underway.