Book Review: <em>Law School: Legal Education in America From the 1850s to the 1980s</em> by Robert Stevens

This Book Review examines Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s, by Robert Stevens. The Review explains that the book is a history of American legal education from 1850 through 1945, with a foreshortened treatment of events to 1870 and a prolonged view of the period between 1870 and 1945. Stevens’s work is chronological and details three developments: the hegemony of Harvard and later the American Bar Association and the Association of American Law Schools over educational standards; the role of Harvard in establishing the primacy of the case method of instruction; and the evolution of Legal Realism as the matrix of legal analysis.