Legal Research and Legal Concepts: Where Form Molds Substance

When Christopher Columbus Langdell stated that the library was the laboratory of the law and that law books were the "stuff" of legal research he was stating a proposition that was not only descriptive but prescriptive.'From the late nineteenth century, the development of the American legal system can be seen as a history of the development of forms of legal publication.This history poses the question whether the forms of publication have been mere vehicles for the transmission of legal knowledge, or important influences in the development of that knowledge.This Essay has two purposes.First, I will examine the suggestion that the form in which law has been conceptualized was strongly influenced by the form in which it was published.Second, I will explore the impact that current technological innovations in legal research may have on the way legal problems and legal structures will be conceptualized in the future. I SETTINGThe earliest forms of modem legal research materials began to take shape in the eighteenth century.Scholars during the Age of Enlightenment sought to use critical reason to free people from irrational prejudice and influence.They searched for rational systems of expression in the sciences and eventually extended this approach to the study of law.Law was a science, a body of knowledge that had its own structure and was reducible to rational propositions.'This perspective dates to William