February 7, 2025

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Then & Now: Langdell Hall – Harvard Legislation University

Then & Now: Langdell Hall – Harvard Legislation University

In 1905, about two many years immediately after the opening of Austin Hall, Harvard Legislation College Dean James Barr Ames commissioned a new setting up to accommodate the legislation school’s escalating inhabitants and library.

Positioned on Holmes Industry, the making was created in a modified neoclassical type with a row of Ionic columns and an exterior façade of buff limestone by the Boston architectural agency Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge. The building’s columns are reminiscent of the modest columns of Dane Hall in Harvard Garden, which was built for the regulation college in 1832 and served as its property for 50 decades.

Langdell Hall was named following Dean James Barr Ames’ predecessor Christopher Columbus Langdell, the first dean of Harvard Law School and creator of the case technique of educating. Today, Langdell Hall is household to the Harvard Legislation Library, the most considerable archive of lawful materials in the globe.

The south wing of Langdell Corridor opened for use in 1907. It featured the Looking at Area on the major floor that spanned the size of the making and a 7-storied stack place to accommodate the library’s rising collection. By 1910 the collection had developed to pretty much 121,000 textbooks and 13,390 pamphlets.

The Studying Place has usually offered sites for research and research — from the cubicles in the stacks to very long tables, examine carrels, and additional not too long ago standup desks. Until finally the late 1990s, a 24-foot square circulation desk was a centerpiece of the place. A book lift also related the circulation desk with the guide stacks in the basement so that pupils could safe the ideal quantity at a moment’s recognize. Right now the circulation desk is conveniently situated in close proximity to the primary entrance of Langdell Hall.

Today the Library’s collections element more than 170 languages and incorporate in excess of 2 million products (actual physical and digital), together with extra than 100,000 uncommon textbooks, and the key law from 240 jurisdictions across the world. 

The north and west wings of Langdell ended up additional amongst 1928 and 1929, far more than doubling the building’s area. The additions included new lecture halls, seminar rooms, administrative offices, library stacks, and a courtroom. The courtroom was modeled soon after the design of the Previous English Courts at Westminster with seats for counsel within the bar on the sides and at appropriate angles to the judges’ bench as properly as before the bench. The room’s fantastic acoustics enabled counsel standing with their back to the audience to be heard in any aspect of the massive area.

The Treasure Home, a display room built in 1948 for unusual guides, manuscripts, and memorabilia documenting the historical past of the regulation, is situated at the north conclude of the Examining Space. Renamed the Caspersen Area in 1997 for Finn M.W. Caspersen ’66, the area hosts rotating distinctive exhibits and displays goods from the library’s Historical & Exclusive Collections documenting the heritage of the regulation and Harvard Legislation College.

Amid the objects that can be identified in the room are: a portrait of the to start with course of women of all ages to graduate from Harvard Regulation School by Melvin Robbins Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ lunch box and home furnishings owned by Harvard Legislation Faculty alumni, these kinds of as Felix Frankfurter Class of 1906, who served on the U.S. Supreme Courtroom.

At the room’s entrance is a memorial to the college students who misplaced their lives in Environment War I and Earth War II.

The Elihu Root Place, found at the south finish of the Looking at Area in a area that experienced been selected a scholar lounge location when Langdell initial opened, was renamed and redecorated in 1939 in honor of Elihu Root (1845-1937), a company attorney and American statesman who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912 for brokering much more than 20 worldwide peace treaties. The Root Room was proven as a location for learners to capture up on rest and the information, or as a location to read publications about legal professionals and the regulation. Nowadays the home is frequented by scientists from close to the environment, who come to entry Harvard Law School’s wide selection of historical authorized elements.

In Oct 2019, the Harvard Law Library opened new team research regions and seminar rooms on the north facet of the primary flooring of Langdell to be made use of for library events, training sessions, and classes.


Then & Now: Langdell was compiled by Linda Grant, Harvard Law College Communications Business office. Unique many thanks to Mik Hamilton, digital archive assistant, Harvard Regulation College Communications Workplace, and Lesley Schoenfeld, general public solutions & visible collections administrator, Historic & Specific Collections for investigate and editorial assistance.

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