More Llewellyn in the New York Times

Following up on my posts on the New York Times report that Karl Llewellyn's students thought he gave an unduly difficult exam (a claim that I want to talk more about soon, now that Columbia's Sabrina Sondhi has turned up some of his exams), I went to dig up the articles about Llewellyn's participation in world war I.  Turns out there's only one by Llewellyn, not two as I had thought, and it's a rather sentimental look at life in a German hospital over Christmas -- probably not all that revealing as to Llewellyn's future writing.  The other article is about the efforts Llewellyn's father made to get him home from the war.  

Now I see an article from the February 20, 1920, Times, "YALE ADDS LAW LECTURERS: Dean Clark Adds Three Visiting Speaker and Two Instructors."  It reports that Llewellyn, Thurman Arnold (then dean of WVU) and Charles McCormick (then of UNC Law) were appointed visiting professors.  Not only, it seems, did the Times fill the space now filled by abovethelaw (regarding student complaints), it also filled the space now filled by Brian Leiter's Law School Reports (regarding visiting faculty appointments at elite schools)!

There are a few other Times articles about Llewellyn worth some comment down the road, like the one about his suggestion that there should be a super-majority of the Supreme Court to strike down legislation on constitutional grounds and another about his critique of the case method in the Journal of Legal Education, and of course his petition regarding Sacco and Vanzetti -- which is what set me off on looking through the Times' archives in the first place.  Never ceases to surprise me what you find in old newspapers.

Comments

[Beau Baez]

Reviewing the exam is useful, but what we really need is his grading rubric. Given the era, he may have just awarded grades based on his sense of how the student performed. I suppose we could reconstruct his grading methodology if we could also find some bluebooks and the grades he assigned to those exams.

[Al Brophy]

Very good points, Beau. Though I have to say that the idea of reading blue books doesn't thrill me, it would be supremely useful to have them. We could learn a lot by seeing how students responded, especially to question two on the 1931 exam (which asks about a contracts case, Harris v. Shorall, in light of a series of other cases and what they say about precedent). Harris is about whether a contract under seal can be modified -- and the New York Court of Appeals allows a modification (and thus bends the common law rule). Cardozo wrote about Shorall in the Nature of the Judicial Process as an example of a case where an old/outmoded rule is modified to a shadow of itself (to use Cardozo's apt imagery). I'm now thinking that such a jurisprudential question may be what Llewellyn's students were complaining about.

I'm not yet sure what the other cases are, but I might guess that they're some of the cases cited in Harris and leading up to it, which had begun to wear away the rule that contracts under seal can't be modified by a parol, unexecuted contract. At any rate, I'd like to post a little more about this if I can figure out the other cases that Llewellyn had his students read for the exam.