Educating Lawyers Now and Then: Two Carnegie Critiques of the Common Law and the Case Method

In Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has again turned its attention to legal education. Much as it did in the early years of the last century, in the first years of this century in its Preparation for the Professions Program (“PPP”), the Carnegie Foundation is examining professional education generally. In the early twentieth century, the Carnegie Foundation published its first report in law, The Common Law and the Case Method in American University Law Schools, prepared in 1914 by Josef Redlich, an Austrian law professor. The two reports are referred to here as the PPP Legal Education Report and as the Redlich Report respectively.

This Article takes three of the four principal themes of the PPP Legal Education Report—the case method, education for practice, and education for the public dimension of law—and contrasts their treatment in the PPP Legal Education Report with that in the Redlich Report. While the two reports are eerily similar, their differences inform us about the course that American legal education took in the last century.