Law Students Should Learn Law Practice (1933)

The law student should learn, while in school, the art of legal practice. And to that end, the law schools should boldly, not slyly and evasively, repudiate the false dogmas of Langdell. They must decide not to exclude, as did Langdell—but to include—the methods of learning law by work in the lawyer's office and attendance at the proceedings of courts of justice. . . . They must repudiate the absurd notion that the heart of a law school is its library.

Jerome Frank, "What Constitutes Good Legal Education?" (speech to the ABA Section of Legal Education, 1933), cited in Edward T. Lee, The Study of Law and Proper Preparation (Chicago, 1935), quoted in Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: Univ. N. Carolina Press, 1983), pp. 156-57.

Law students should learn legal research

A lawyer's books are more than merely the tools with which he works. They are the field which he must cultivate, the mine which he must explore. Obviously, therefore, it is of the first importance that a lawyer should know how to get at the material stored away in the volume at his hand. The law student cannot learn all the law during the two or three or four years of his legal studies, and it is an important part of his work to learn how to use lawbooks.

Edward Q. Keasbey, Instruction in Finding Cases, 1 Am. L. Sch. Rev. 69, 69 (1906*)

The American Law School Review was published by West Publishing Company 1902-47. Edward Q. Keasbey, of the Newark, N.J. Bar, was chairman of the American Bar Association's Committee on Law Reporting and Digesting.

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*HeinOnline says the volume covered 1902-1906. This article was in vol. 1, no. 3. Since a note on p. iii of the volumes says that vol. 1, no. 2 was issued in Nov. 1906, I'm going with 1906.

Casebooks shape legal minds

Do judges read casebooks? No, but their future law clerks do. And future lawyers—the ones who will soon be presenting cases in court—do. Some of the people who are reading casebooks today will be working on my opinions just six months from now; others will be presenting cases in a few years. Sure, teachers in the classroom make a big difference, but ultimately what lawyers take away from their Law school experience is what is in the casebooks. Casebooks provide a common language that transcends particular law schools or generations of lawyers—I can usually get a knowing nod from my law clerks when I speak about the ships Peerless—and casebooks also provide young lawyers with a fundamental outlook on the legal landscape, which in turn shapes their approach to cases. Eventually, lawyers may outgrow their contracts or torts casebooks, but it takes many years of practice. Some never do.

Judge Alex Kozinski, Who Gives a Hoot About Legal Scholarship?, 37 Hous. L. Rev. 295, 298 (2000) (footnote omitted).