![]() ![]() ![]() Gray was, for example, the author of The Rule Against Perpetuities (1886), the treatise that reduced perpetuities law to a single Rule elaborated through remorseless logic, a Rule populated by fertile octogenarians, unborn widows, and endless probates. ![]() As a legal scholar, Gray's eminence rivaled Langdell's. Gray taught at Harvard Law School from 1869 to 1913. This article, through an extended study of John Chipman Gray's jurisprudential and doctrinal writing and teaching, substantially alters the conventional understanding of classical orthodoxy. As Christopher Columbus Langdell, Dean of the Harvard Law School, once notoriously declared: considerations of public policy and substantial justice were "irrelevant" to a correct determination of the rules of law. According to the standard view, classical jurists posited that law was an autonomous and politically neutral enterprise, a matter of logic rather than judicial discretion. Between the 1870s and the 1930s American law was dominated by a jurisprudential style variously described as "mechanical jurisprudence," "legal formalism," and "classical legal thought." Standard histories of American legal thought describe classical orthodoxy as a jurisprudence that (1) modeled law on the physical sciences, and (2) rigorously separated legal analysis from moral considerations. ![]()
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