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chapter 2 Lawyer on Wall Street, 1855–1870 Entering the practice of law in New York City in January 1855, Langdell believed that a lawyer’s “abilities, learning, or experience” would determine his professional success or failure, because law was not a matter of whim, caprice, or “private and other ‘influences’ with the judges,” but an apolitical science requiring devoted study. Langdell’s conviction that academic merit determined one’s professional fortunes also entailed a commitment to “democracy,” as one friend remarked, in the sense that there existed equal opportunity to succeed at the bar.1 Consequently, scientific expertise, academic merit, professional success, and equal opportunity coincided, in Langdell’s view. His first dozen years in New York City confirmed this formulation. Impressed by his legal knowledge and diligence, leading attorneys recruited him to work on prominent cases in the higher courts of New York State, and he gained a reputation as a shrewd and effective attorney. By 1860 he had already built a flourishing practice and was nearly “driven to death” by the press of routine and complex litigation flowing into his office at 16 Wall Street.2 In 1869, when the founding president of the Erie Railroad and his family sought out “the highest legal ability in the country” to contest a will, they were referred by other attorneys to Langdell.3 Beyond serving as a prominent, effective, and busy lawyer, Langdell helped to establish a new role in litigation: crafting the extensive written brief that was beginning to displace the weight of oral argument in complicated cases arising from large and intricate commercial transactions. During the “Erie Wars” scandals of 1868 and 1869, however, Langdell became disaffected from the New York City bench and bar. In a city run by Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall, Langdell, like some of his associates, abhorred the corruption of the judiciary and the complicity of eminent lawyers in that corruption. By the time 1. Quotations are from A. Russell to Machen (1 May 1868). 2. Langdell to Webster (12 June 1858). 3. Whiton to Lord (circa 1871). Lawyer on Wall Street 43 Langdell accepted a professorship at hls and left Wall Street in 1870, his experience in New York had strengthened and extended his view that professional success requires strong legal science acquired through a demanding legal education. After practicing in the cloaca maxima of the legal world that was New York City, he concluded that the just working of the legal system relies on the effectiveness and authority of the legal profession, which depend on lawyers’ merit that is derived from their academic achievement in law school. The newly appointed Professor Langdell viewed lawyers’ acquisition of strong legal science through demanding academic study as the means not only to elevate the legal profession, but also to safeguard the integrity of the legal system. Entering the Bar Legal practice in New York City during the 1850s and 1860s was shaped by several contextual factors, above all the machinations and corruption of Tammany Hall, the political organization that met in the hall of the Tammany Society during the second quarter of the nineteenth century and that, by the 1850s, had become coextensive with the leadership of the emerging Democratic Party in New York County. By 1900 Tammany Hall was known as “the most powerful, efficient, corrupt political machine in the history of urban America.”4 Lawyers routinely encountered Tammany’s degradation of law and politics, as did Langdell in representing a group of citizens who were challenging the price-gouging that had resulted from an apparently corrupt municipal contract.5 During Langdell’s residence in the city, public offices, franchises, and contracts were sold to the highest bidder by political bosses, such as Mayor Fernando Wood, and by the “forty thieves” of the bicameral city legislature, which comprised twenty-four councilmen and seventeen aldermen.6 One alderman was William M. Tweed, who rose to become Boss Tweed of the Democratic Party during the late 1860s. Another contextual factor was the transformation of the court system, which the new state constitution of 1846 had drastically reorganized above the level of original jurisdiction for small civil and criminal complaints. One major change was to establish the Court of Appeals as the state’s highest court. Another was to eliminate separate courts of equity and vest their jurisdiction in a misleadingly 4. Alexander B. Callow Jr., introduction to History of Tammany Hall, by G. Myers, v. See Mushkat, Tammany: The Evolution of a Political Machine...

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