One needs to look no further than the current United States Supreme Court to see the singular influence of the Harvard Law School, an institution that educated half the sitting justices. Throughout its 200 year history, Harvard Law's imprint on American legal life has been unrivaled, not only for its ties to iconic figures—Felix Frankfurter, Louis Brandeis, Roscoe Pound, and many others—but also because law school administrators and professors across the country replicated its practices. It is little surprise, then, that almost since its founding in 1817, much ink has been spilled documenting the history of Harvard Law. Many of these institutional histories offered overly sympathetic renditions of the school's past (often because Harvard Law sponsored the research). Since the 1970s, a revisionist literature has emerged that often veers into the realm of caustic takedown. Daniel R. Coquillette, a former law school dean, and Bruce A. Kimball, a historian of education, have now produced the first of a two volume study of Harvard Law that attempts to chart a course between bland praise and knee-jerk antagonism. On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, The First Century succeeds in crafting a history of the school that is meticulous in its research, lucid in its prose, and, above all, nuanced in its findings.

Coquillette and Kimball make a convincing case that the mainstream features of present legal education were once radical, and became standard because Harvard Law pioneered them in the first 100 years of its existence. The very founding of Harvard Law reflected the novel notion that institutions of higher learning had a role to play in the education of American lawyers, who were otherwise trained as apprentices. Striving to become an institution with national reach, Harvard Law also popularized the idea that legal training was tied to the cultivation of a national elite. This conviction stemmed from Joseph Story, who simultaneously sat on the Supreme Court and served as the Dane Professor of Law from 1829 to 1845. At a time when legal customs were highly local, the nationalistic Story envisioned Harvard Law as a force for domestic unity. The institution was also at the vanguard of academic meritocracy thanks to the reforms of Dean Christopher C. Langdell in the late nineteenth century. Langdell heightened requirements for both admission and graduation, and increased pedagogical rigor with the introduction of the case method (those who have read Kimball's The Inception of Modern Professional Education: C. C. Langdell, 1826–1906, will find this much familiar). To say that Harvard Law moved toward a merit-based system is not to say that it took all qualified comers. As the title of the book suggests, merit was not a sunny meadow. It was a battlefield. “In the century before 1910, there were no women and no Asian Americans at the school,” Coquillette and Kimball found. “Only one Native American, four Latinos, and nine African Americans enrolled” (521).

On the Battlefield of Merit employs a narrative approach that reanimates the idiosyncratic personalities and daily dramas of Harvard Law. Offering a more comprehensive view of institutional life than do earlier histories, the book affords attention to the student experience and the role of finances. The authors also situate the development of the school in the broad stream of American history, especially in the sectional tensions that precipitated the Civil War. The notorious case of Anthony Burns, recounted in Chapter 7, showcases the centrality of Harvard Law to the heated debates over slavery that raged in the 1850s. Burns was a resident of Boston who had escaped bondage in Virginia. When his owner discovered Burns's whereabouts in 1854, he secured an arrest warrant for Burns from a Boston judge under the Fugitive Slave Act, a piece of federal legislation that was deeply unpopular in the North. As Burns awaited his hearing, a group of abolitionists staged an unsuccessful attempt to storm the courthouse and set the prisoner loose. As Coquillette and Kimball detail, “The Law School was directly involved in every way” (237). An abolitionist student partook in the ill-fated courthouse raid, Southern students served as bodyguards for Burns's owner, and the presiding judge doubled as a lecturer at Harvard Law. When the judge ruled against Burns, the decision resulted in the judge's removal from the Law School faculty and exacerbated sectional antagonisms among the students. By recruiting a student body that was national rather than regional in character—fully 30% hailed from slave states—Harvard Law had unwittingly positioned itself to become a hotbed of antebellum rancor.

There is, perhaps, more that could be said about international context. To be fair, an introductory chapter does discuss the English and Continental foundations of Harvard Law's curriculum and culture. However, the international dimension largely fades from view thereafter. Prominent Harvard Law alumni such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and John Henry Wigmore cultivated close ties with jurists overseas; therefore, one wonders whether these relationships, or even just the sheer prestige of their alma mater, influenced legal education abroad. This question is not so much a criticism as a suggestion for further research by a comparative-minded scholar. The book is already capacious in scope, spanning nearly 700 pages, and like all books, it must mark the limits of its ambit somewhere.

If the authors' forthcoming work on the second century of Harvard Law is as sweeping as On the Battlefield of Merit, together these volumes will stand as the definitive history of the institution for some time to come. And there is good reason to believe that this next book might be an even richer text than the initial study. Coquillette and Kimball will supplement their archival research with an extensive collection of oral histories from administrators, faculty, and staff. Anyone who enjoys the fruits of this first installment will have high expectations for the sequel.