Harvard Law School

“ Broadly underlying all the decisions of the committee can be traced the great truth spoken by Judge Cooley at the dinner last June of the Harvard Law School Association: “The strength of the law lies in its commonplace character; and it becomes feeble and untrustworthy when it expresses something different from the common thoughts of man.” ”

“ But gradually he devoted less of his time to practice and more to lecturing in the Harvard Law School, to editing court reports and to contributions to law journals, especially on historical and biographical lines, in which his erudition was unsurpassed. ”

“ The Harvard Law School has been peculiarly favored in the men who, from its earliest days to the present time, have filled the positions of professors and lecturers. The oldest professorship is the Royall professorship, which was endowed by Hon. ”

“ Aside, too, from the excellent practice afforded to those who take part, such trials may be made a means of familiarizing those who witness them with the actual court practice of English and American courts. One other point suggests itself. The Law School has hitherto furnished nothing to attract the college students within its walls, and kindle an interest among them in the study of the profession which so many of them adopt. Does not this year’s experience show that these trials are adapted to serve just that purpose? ”

“ The son graduated at Harvard in 1859, studied law in Boston and was admitted to the bar there in 1862. In 1869 he removed to Washington, where for three years he published the United States Jurist. After his return to Boston, in 1874, he devoted himself to office practice and to literary pursuits. He was a lecturer in the law school of Boston University between 1885 and 1903, a non-resident professor and lecturer in the National University Law School, Washington, D.C., in 1887–1909, and a lecturer on American history and constitutional law at Johns Hopkins University in 1891–1908. ”

“ Also, there is one free law school in America—at Harvard. We have seen Dean Pound and Professors Frankfurter, Sayre and Chafee taking a bold stand for freedom of speech. These men fearlessly teach the evolution of law, and suggest to their students the possibility of improvement in American institutions. ”

“ An eminent American educator and legal scholar. He was born in Boston, graduated in 1868 at Harvard and in 1872 at the Law School of the University, in 1868–69 was an instructor in a private school at Boston, and from 1871 to 1872 was tutor in German and French at Harvard. ”

“ This catalogue will be published early in June next, and it is expected that a copy will be sent free to each member of the Association.”
In the work of Mr. Finch, Law Lecturer at Queen’s College, Cambridge, we recognize an undertaking which inaugurates in England the method of instruction established in this school by Professor Langdell seventeen years ago. Legal education in England may be said to be entering on a fourth stage. ”

“ But what would be the answer of those who deny these propositions?”
The Law School opens this year with 204 students, classified as follows: Graduates, 2; third-year, 31; second-year, 52; first-year, 80; special, 39. Those entering the School are 113 in number. These newcomers are drawn from different States and countries, as is shown below: Massachusetts, 50 ”

“ We are fortunate in being able to announce for that number articles by Professor William A. Keener, of the Law School, and Frederick Jessup Stimson, of New York.
An important subject in its influence on legal education is the num- ber of years of study required for the ordinary degree of A.B. Earlier in the century four years did not seem too short a time for this degree; for the age at which men entered college was much lower than the average at the present day. Professional study was also much slighter. ”

“ This was the purpose for which the Boston University Law School was founded; this has been the constant aim of its teachings; and the selection of practitioners for instructors, coming fresh from consultations with their clients, and from sharp contests in the court-rooms, has been made from the first with the endeavor to set before the students live men, who could tell them what to do and how to do it.
If students could be more frequently brought face to face with the living heroes of the law, the zeal for careful work and laborious study would be fanned almost into enthusiasm. ”

“ Mr. Finch has published a Selection of Cases on the English Law of Contract, Part I., and an inaugural address on Legal Education, its Aim and Method. The important features of this fourth stage of legal education in England are (a) the radical change in the source of instruction, — for it now begins to be given at universities by scholars holding university professorships, instead of in London by barristers under the auspices of the Inns of Court ”

“ In short, it may be that we have carried the notion of litigation as a contest of wits between two sides so far that the interests of society have not been adequately safeguarded.
If laymen have erred in concentrating on minor points, lawyers have been far too ready to deny laymen any right to discuss law at all. It is just as if school-teachers should maintain that parents and citizens in general have no concern in the problems of education. The time has come to close the gulf in American life between the legal profession and the people who are ruled by laws. ”

“ The law school, the proving ground for legal learning and practice, cannot be effective in isolation from the individuals and institutions with which the law interacts. Few students, and no one who has practiced law, would choose to study in an academic vacuum, removed from the interplay of ideas and the exchange of views with which the law is concerned. ”

“ Addison’s “Torts” is put before the student; after that comes Greenleaf’s and Stephen’s treatises on the law of evidence. Those men who purpose to practise in New York then take up the “New York Code of Civil Procedure,” while those who intend to practise in other States study “Stephen’s Pleading” and a short course on equity pleading. The year winds up with Bispham’s “Equity Jurisprudence” and a general review of the work of the two years.
The study of constitutional law, constitutional history, medical jurisprudence, and criminal law is conducted entirely by lectures. ”

“ He was professor of law at Harvard in 1816-'27, president of the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1820, and took a spirited part in debate when he was relieved from the duties of presiding officer. Harvard gave him the degree of LL. D. in 1814. “His fame,” says Chief-Justice Story, “must rest on the printed reports of his own decisions. These will go down to future ages.” ”

“ Every member of the bar of any court has all the legal rights of any other member of it.
The qualifications for admission to the bar are generally left to be regulated by the courts. In a few States they are fixed by constitutional or statutory provisions. In all, when the Constitutions do not regulate it, the legislature can. It has indeed been asserted that the admission of attorneys is in its nature a matter for the courts only. [Footnote: See American Law School Review, I, 211.] ”

“ But in Wall Street the young student whose ambition is to appear before the Supreme Court of the United States in some constitutional matter as soon as possible is apt to spend his early years in brief writing and then become a specialist in real estate, corporation, admiralty or probate law and perhaps never see the inside of a trial court at all, much less a police court, which, to the poor and ignorant, at any rate, is the most important court of any of them, since it is here that the citizen must go to enforce his everyday rights. ”

“ It may help us to know the true limit of a doctrine, but its chief good is to burst inflated explanations. Every one instinctively recognizes that in these days the justification of a law for us cannot be found in the fact that our fathers always have followed it. It must be found in some help which the law brings toward reaching a social end which the governing power of the community has made up its mind that it wants. And when a lawyer sees a rule of law in force he is very apt to invent, if he does not find, some ground of policy for its base. ”

“ Not only in the court room, but in the consultation chamber the lawyer sometimes yields to the temptation to turn his talents to a sordid use. The schemes of spoliation that defy the officers of the law are, for the most part, inaugurated and directed by legal minds. President Roosevelt, speaking at Harvard a few years ago, complained that the graduates of that great university frequently furnished the brains for conspiracies against the public welfare. ”

“ When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well known profession. We are studying what we shall want in order to appear before judges, or to advise people in such a way as to keep them out of court. The reason why it is a profession, why people will pay lawyers to argue for them or to advise them, is that in societies like ours the command of the public force is intrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry out their judgments and decrees. ”

“ But if you cannot get a college education, do not get discouraged. It is possible that you are an Abraham Lincoln, or a John Marshall, or some person like that; and if you are you will succeed anyhow. Even if you are not so highly gifted you can win in the law without a college education if you are naturally a lawyer and will work hard enough. If you have to choose between a law school and a college education, take the latter. But the training afforded by a clerkship in an active lawyer's office is more helpful than either. ”

“ An exclusive claim, and possession and user, and taking of the profits thereof, for 150 years, by the corporation of Harvard College, without interruption, was as decisive evidence of its exclusive right to the franchise in perpetuity, as the title deed of any man to his own estate. The legislature of Massachusetts has never, so far as I know, breathed a doubt on the point. All the judges of the state court admit the exclusive right of Harvard College to the ferry, in the most unequivocal terms. ”

“ If the United States, or each State, had a school for the education of judges in which the course of study, in addition to a knowledge of the principles of law, aimed to fit the pupils to administer justice without much regard to mere technicalities or legal hairsplitting, and which kept in view, first and foremost, that the courts were for the benefit of the people at large, and not to furnish a living for lawyers, the gain to justice would be something akin to what modern inventions have given us in contrast with the methods of former generations. ”

“ Candidates for the bar ordinarily prepared for practice by reading in a lawyer's office, a good old method that perhaps has some merits, but one which did not, save in the case of a teacher of exceptional qualifications, give a uniform preparation or an insight into the principles of legal philosophy. As the general level of education advanced, however, the advantages of some systematic instruction in law became more and more apparent, and it was not long after the establishment of the University before demands for a Law School began to be heard. ”

“ Professors should not be responsible for the manners of students, beyond the legitimate operation of their personal influence. Academic jurisdiction should have no criminal code, should inflict no penalty but that of expulsion, and that only in the way of self-defence against positively noxious and dangerous members. Let the civil law take care of civil offences. The American citizen should early learn to govern himself, and to re-enact the civil law by free consent. ”

“ If that, therefore, can be taken away or impaired by legislation, either or all of the other rights can be so taken away or impaired. It is true that courts, by the common law, possess authority to adopt rules for the admission of counsel; but this is to enable them, for their own advantage and the benefit and protection of suitors, to obtain, not to exclude, lawyers of competent legal learning and of fair character. They have no right to use the power so as to exclude them. ”

“ Candidates for the Bar are mostly University men, more mature in years, perhaps, than our [13] graduates—for boys commence and end their college courses late in England—and they are, as a rule, more broadly cultivated than those who intend to become solicitors. Some, indeed, take a full course of theoretical law at Oxford or Cambridge before beginning practical training as a student in one of the Inns of Court, which are peculiarly British institutions, having no counterpart elsewhere. ”

“ The importance of lawyers as legislators and executives in the actual work of American government has been an indirect consequence of the peculiar function of the Supreme Court in the American political system. The state constitutions confer a corresponding function on the highest state courts, although they make no similar provision for the independence of the state judiciary. The whole business of American government is so entangled in a network of legal conditions that a training in the law is the beet education which an American public man can receive. ”