After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree, Langford enrolled in 1920 as a graduate student at Harvard University, where he earned his Doctor of Philosophy in psychology under Edwin Boring in 1924. With the aid of a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, he studied logic and philosophy at Cambridge University during 1924–1925.
After spending his freshman year at the University of Arkansas, Langford transferred in 1915 to Clark University, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1920. His college education was interrupted by World War I in 1917 when he joined the United States. army and spent 20 months overseas. Upon his return to the United States., Langford became an instructor at Harvard from 1925 to 1927.
After spending two academic years, 1927–1929, as an assistant professor at the University of Washington, he became in the autumn of 1929 an associate professor with tenure in the philosophy department at the University of Michigan.
Langford became a full professor at U. Michigan in 1933, remaining there for the rest of his career. In the academic year 1935–1936, he was a Guggenheim fellow, dividing his time between Vienna and Cambridge England.
Langford is famous as co-author of the 1932 book Symbolic Logic and the system of modal logic S5. His doctoral students include Arthur Walter Burks.
