Modern Legal Times: Making a Professional Legal Culture

This essay is a truncated history of the making of the American legal profession. In contrast to other efforts, the focus of this paper is on the creation and development of legal institutions which fostered the belief, by lawyers, in their professionalism. Legal institutions include not only law schools, bar associations and organizations like the American Law Institute but also the system of legal directories, the regional case reporter system developed by the West Publishing Company and continuing legal education groups. These institutions, which contributed greatly to the making of a distinctly professional culture in law in America, are closely related to the formation of the system of legal education first developed at Harvard Law School in 1870. While a number of institutions were created for instrumental reasons having nothing to do with legal education (like Hubbell’s Legal Directory and the regional reporter system), these institutions prospered in part because of their ideological fit with the professionalizing ethos embodied Langdell’s statement that "law is a science.