Biography|Stephen J. Adler — The Law Degree He Took in Langdell Hall

In 1983 Stephen J. Adler took a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Langdell Hall is the school's largest building and holds the law library.

Dean James Barr Ames commissioned it in 1905 when the school outgrew H. H. Richardson's Austin Hall.

Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge designed the limestone block. The south wing opened in 1907.

The pin is the public front of that hall on the Cambridge campus, not a classroom desk.

Adler already had the 1977 Harvard College degree. The law year is the second dated credential every later employer repeated: BusinessWeek's 2004 appointment release, Thomson Reuters biographies, and the Columbia Journalism School directory.

He did not stay to practice. The same year he finished the degree he joined The American Lawyer in New York as a journalist, not as a litigator.

That magazine path ran five years. In 1988 he moved to The Wall Street Journal as legal editor.

The book that later won him the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel, The Jury: Trial and Error in the American Courtroom, was published in 1994 by Times Books. It grew out of the legal-reporting beat, not out of a firm.

Langdell is where the law training is geographically fixed. The rest of the career is newsrooms.

The hall still sits on Holmes Field. The library inside is still the one the school advertises as the largest academic law library in the world.

Photo: John Phelan, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.