[We have the following announcement. DRE]
The Fall 2025 James McCormick Mitchell Lecture at the University at Buffalo School of Law
Friday, November 14, 2025. Lecture at 2:30 p.m. Panel Discussion at 3:30 p.m. Reception at 4:30 p.m. Charles B. Sears Law Library, John Lord O’Brian Hall, UB (North Campus)
“Reflections on Legal Education and the Post-War Middle Class,” by John Henry Schlegel
The history of American legal education, the one that “everybody knows,” begins with Christopher Columbus Langdell, the first Dean of the Harvard Law School, who discovered, not a continent, but case law, the large class, and the cold call and used them to wrestle legal education from practicing lawyers who apparently didn’t understand what they did every day. Thereafter, Legal Realism moved the focus of the classroom from what the case law was to what it should be, and their grandchildren attended to matters of ethnicity, race and gender. Matters of social class, while not verboten, are seldom adverted to in this story. Reflections on Legal Education and the Post-War Middle Class attempts to repair this historical absence by inserting aspects of class into the story both generally and more specifically in explaining behavior by contemporary law students that their professors complain about while they teach as if without students.
Join us as we celebrate Prof. Schlegel on his 50+ years of distinguished teaching and scholarship at a reception to follow the lecture. Free and open to the public. Registration is required. Prof. John Henry Schlegel is a UB Distinguished Professor and Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar at the University at Buffalo School of Law. He joined the UB Law faculty in 1973, teaching for more than five decades primarily in the areas of corporate and commercial law and regional economic development.
A legal historian, his scholarship has focused on the history of legal education and the evolution of American Legal Realism in the 1920s and 30s. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including, most recently, While Waiting for Rain: Community, Economy and Law in a Time of Change (University of Michigan Press, 2022).
