Elements of the Law

Abstract

When Geof Stone, then Dean of the Law School, asked me ten years ago to teach a section of Elements of the Law, I was flattered and delighted -at least until a few days later when he asked me what I would try to do with the course. When I told him, his face seemed to fall slightly but he recovered quickly and said, "That's not what Cass does." It testifies to Geof's polished charm that I wasn't sure whether I was being gently rebuked for insubordination or lightly complimented for ingenuity. In any event, I was stimulated to investigate what might be called the original intent of the course, which has been a fixture of the firstyear curriculum since 1937 and has been taught by a (baker's) dozen faculty members since its inception.! I discovered that the description of the course in the Law School catalog has changed very little but that the content and nominal objective have changed, sometimes radically, with each new instructor. The changes were the product not only of professorial idiosyncrasy but also of continuously shifting focus in theories both of teaching and of precedent in American law. As with so many dramatic changes at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, Elements of the Law began with a conversation prompted by Robert Maynard Hutchins, who left the deanship of Yale Law School to become President of the University in 1929 at the age of 30. Hutchins inherited a distinguished research university whose initial momentum from its founding at the turn of the century was beginning to flag.2 Nonetheless, many members of the faculty were