Law as ''the common thoughts of men'': The law-teaching and judging of Thomas McIntyre Cooley

In this article, Professor Carrington offers an intellectual history of Thomas McIntyre Cooley. Cooley, a close contemporary of Dean Langdell, was in his time the premier judge, law teacher, and legal scholar in America, overshadowing not only Langdell, but his somewhat younger associate, Oliver Wendell Holmes. The twentieth century has neglected, even seamed, Cooley, while elevating Langdell and Holmes: Langdell as the patron of a technocratic profession trained by Hessians, and Holmes as the patron of a disengaged academic subprofession. In the Jacksonian universe producing Cooley, there was little appreciation of the likes of either Langdell and his successors, or Holmes and his. This article compares the law teaching of Cooley to that of Langdell, and his judging to that of Holmes, and imagines that Cooley might in the twenty-first century regain some of the respect he lost in the twentieth.