Langdell
adopted an internal perspective and "believed that through scientific methods
lawyers could derive correct legal judgments from a few fundamental principles
and concepts, which it was the task of the scholar-scientist like himself to discover
... Langdell and his followers took the view of law as science seriously and carried
it out programmatically in a way that had no precedent in the common law world,
erecting a vast discursive structure that came to dominate legal education and
to greatly influence the practical work of lawyers and judges." [Thomas C.
Grey, "Langdell’s
Orthodoxy," 45 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 1, 5-6 (1983)]