Legal History Commons^™

From Premodern To Modern American Jurisprudence: The Onset Of Positivism, Stephen M. Feldman

Vanderbilt Law Review

What distinguished premodern from modern American jurisprudence? Whereas most commentators agree that the transition from premodernism to modernism occurred around the Civil War,' recent writings reveal dissension regarding the nature of antebellum and postbellum jurisprudence. In a wonderfully detailed study of Christopher Columbus Langdell, his jurisprudence, and his case method of teaching, William P. LaPiana argues that a defining feature of Langdell's postbellum legal science was a positivism that contrasted with a natural law orientation characteristic of the earlier antebellum jurisprudence. In a provocative critical essay, Robert W. Gordon argues to the contrary: LaPiana's emphasis on natural law during the …