Part I takes up the changes in legal education associated with Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard, and discusses the intellectual roots of the case method, the justifications offered in its support, and the narrative tendencies that it relies on and promotes. This essay explores those connections by considering various historical and structural analogies between the case method and the detective story. When the early advocates of the case method talked about legal science, they emphasized scientific values such as coherence, clarity, and consistency, but an equally important aspect of the enterprise received much less rhetorical emphasis - namely, the method itself, which reflected the forms of scientific inquiry exemplified by Lyell and Darwin. These two developments, in literature and law, stem from a common source - the emergence of new scientific methods aimed at tracing visible effects back to their hidden causes, exemplified by Charles Lyell’s work in geology and Charles Darwin’s work in evolution. Law teaching changed similarly, moving from the methods of lecture and memorization to an approach that required students to navigate a narrative medium (the case) and to discover its essential components on their own. This explanation echoes the rationales offered by the advocates of the case method when it was first being endorsed around the same time. Detective stories changed in the late nineteenth century, for the first time organizing their narrative structure around the use of clues, and hence claiming to promote logical reasoning in a way that allowed the reader to compete with the detective in solving the mystery. This essay explores that analogy, arguing that detective fiction’s asserted concern with the logical analysis of clues helps to show why exponents of legal doctrine would look to this genre as a model. Many scholars have compared legal judgments with detective stories, and have suggested that law professors should teach cases in a way that reflects the structure of detective fiction. Just for the life it gave me, and the relationship it created between me and Holmes. I became an addicted, impassioned chronicler. In writing them I relived them, in preparing to write them, they heightened my experience of them as they happened. I loved the thrill, the humour, the challenge portrayed in the Sherlock short stories and books. He recreated the story of the crime, whilst I recreated the story of his story. We veered on two different journeys without fully knowing it until the last few months, without realising that our stories might threaten each other. That was one of the differences that gradually destroyed our friendship. The world had become a draft diary, an internal narrative adding to that of the public one with Holmes, trying to create his imaginary world of clues sewn together to trap the culprit.
Had I become my writings? From the very moment of a case beginning, even in that quiet morning, with horses' hooves, and shouting newspaper boys-just before it was to break into an adventure-the silent tension of this room, my mind would scan our world, noting details and feelings that could form the start of one of my written stories. The stories, even more complicated whorls of identity, curved scribblings. Could I have prevented what is about to happen? Did these fingers, looming like five snakes about to break the glass, write the stories that lead to this final one. Was I born for today? Where these patterns, of curved lines and loops, my uniqueness hiding amongst the swirls, the story of my life. I examine my hands, the ripples of the fingerprints as laid down before my birth, as if ripples had left their mark on the sand of a beach. I pickup the large magnifying glass from the crowded, round side table, next to the worn comfortable leather chair. The stories you know of me, the man you know as Dr Watson, and my hero and mentor, Sherlock Holmes. This will change the life I have shared with you, my readers, through my reports of the criminal cases we have worked together. This involves you, for we have a relationship. Despite some truly awful days, days of loss, of bereavement, of injury and failure, today will see me question, challenge, the greatest friend I have ever had, and the life we have shared privately and publicly. What is the detective? How do we seek truth and justice? The very foundations of justice are threatened. The story that pits Watson against Holmes and in which Dupin tries to save them from Prof Moriarty.
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