2. For example, this effort would counteract the lamentable habit of crediting at face value Holmes's 1880 judgment of Langdell as a “legal theologian” without factoring in the point that Holmes was reviewing the work of an oddball from New Hampshire who had successfully built and transformed Harvard Law School, while he, Holmes, was still struggling under the unfulfilled expectation that, like his famous father and before the age of forty, he “would likewise enter a profession, undertake original and ultimately renowned, professional scholarship, and accept a professorship at Harvard University.” Conversely, Langdell and his protege Ames were silent when in 1882 President Eliot asked the three-person, law school faulty whether they “were prepared to make any effort to get an endowment” to support a professorship for Holmes. White, G. Edward, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13, 200Google Scholar. Though Langdell's reticence in this regard was likely unknown to Holmes, the latter returned the favor in his brief address at the commemoration of Langdell's retirement as Dean by not naming or even referring to Langdell and obliquely criticizing most of what Langdell stood for: enshrining “learning,” “historic continuity,” and “reason” in legal education. Address by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Harvard Law School Association, Report of the Ninth Annual Meeting, June 25, 1895, in especial honor of Christopher Columbus Langdell (Boston: Harvard Law School Association, 1895), 60–62Google Scholar. Langdell's and Holmes's judgments of each other are based not only on logic but also their experience.
