It all started when one Isaac Royall died in 1781 and included in his will a provision for "a Professor of Laws . . . or a Professor of Physick and Anatomy, whichever the . . . Overseers and Corporation shall judge to be best." Appalled by his grammar, the Overseers nevertheless spent 34 years collecting the money. By 1815 all $7500 was in the till, so the Corporation flipped a spare half-dime, decided that it should keep the skeletons looked in the closet, and went out and hired Massachusetts Chief Justice Isaac Parker as Royall Professor of Law.

The plan did not work out too well, as Parker had little time left over from his judicial duties and merely gave occasional lectures to groups of undergraduates, graduates, and a sprinkling of Boston lawyers.

To remedy this trouble, Parker proposed to the Corporation that a Law School be set up separate from the College. The Corporation immediately accepted the plan, and announced the establishment of the first school of law at any American or British university. The new school was housed in three ground floor rooms of a building next to the County Courthouse, and County Attorney Asahel Stearns was named University Professor of Law to handle the administrative burden and aid Parker in his teaching duties.

Low Attendance

This revolutionary plan did little to cure the law situation as new students averaged only about nine a year during the next decade. Just when the Corporation was wishing that it had gone into the anatomy business instead, it managed to secure the resignations of Parker and Stearns, got Nathan Dane, a leading Federalist politician, to give $10,000 for a Dane Professorship for Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, and hired John Hooker Ashmun to serve as a full-time Royall Professor.

These sweeping changes immediately doubled Law School enrollment, and registration figures continued growing year by year. This immediately created a new problem, for three rooms could no longer contain the activity of the would-be lawyers.

Again Dane came to the rescue, this time with the donation of funds to construct Dane Hall. At this point the Law School entered the first of its many "golden ages," as, under Story's leadership, it grew to 150 students. To teach all these, several new instructors were appointed, including the later-to-be-famous Charles Sumner. Another Story innovation was the division of the School into classes according to proficiency.

Golden Age

Story was just about to resign as Supreme Court Justice and devote his full time to the Law School, when he died suddenly in 1845. He was mourned by his contemporaries as a "great personality behind a great institution."

The triumvirate of Professors Parker, Parsons, and Washburn new took over the management of the school. Continuing to follow the general pattern laid down by Story, they arrived at a "golden age" during the Civil War.

Immediately after the War, however, a reaction set in. Standards of scholarship declined as students treated the school as a place to learn a trade. No Faculty meetings had been held in 20 years, and the course offerings of the school remained unchanged throughout the period. By 1869 the situation had grown so bad that the influential American Law Review declared: "The condition of the Harvard Law School is almost a disgrace to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts."

At this juncture, the Corporation voted to establish a Deanship for the Law School, and Christopher Columbus Langdell, recently appointed Dane Professor of Law, was elected to fill the post.

Thus the Law School entered its modern era.

The first step in repairing the school's reputation was the requirement that students pass an examination to receive degrees. In 1876, the length of the law course was extended from two to three years. Meanwhile, making up for 20 years lost time, Langdell had made extensive changes in the curriculum.

But the greatest of all Langdell's innovations was the establishment of the "case system" of instruction. Whereas formerly students learned the law from texts, they now turned to the original cases which made the law, learning what reasoning was behind decisions and the conditions under which the case had developed.