Legal instruction

“ The office of a practising lawyer was the only place in which the law could be learned, if at all. The eminent authority just mentioned thus sketched the process of legal training in his day: “It is a most melancholy state of things. There is nothing like education for law students now. ”

“ In these less aristocratic and more prosaic days, however, he is obliged diligently to apply himself to study, and to pass, from time to time, regular and strict examinations, prescribed by the Council of Legal Education, so that his equipment is no longer left to chance, but is really measured with cold accuracy. ”

“ The curriculum of legal subjects in which lectures are given and examinations held is calculated to give a student a sound fundamental knowledge of general principles, as well as an elementary acquaintance with the rules of modern English law. Jurisprudence, Roman law, Constitutional law and International law are taught, as well as the law of Real and Personal Property, the Law of Contract and Tort, Criminal law, Procedure and Evidence. But the law tripos and the law schools suffer from remoteness from the law courts, and from the exclusively academical character of the teaching. ”

“ As we proceed, however, we are struck more and more with the prominence of the scientific element in legal education. The great compilations are not received as having any authority in England, but they are the sole legal teaching which is to be obtained in the schools where Englishmen go to learn law. ”

“ The evident want of some assistance in the rudiments of legal knowlege, has given birth to a practice, which, if ever it had grown to be general, must have proved of extremely perni-32-cious consequence: I mean the custom, by some so very warmly recommended, to drop all liberal education, as of no use to lawyers ”

“ A great number of the cases, too, which are raised for discussion in the law-books, appear to be rather possible than real, rather problematical cases proposed by a teacher to his students to be argued upon according to general principles, than as actual serious subjects for legal discussion. ”

“ Of recent years, however, there has been a change in the attitude towards the teaching of law. It has come to be recognized that our law is a changing and developing force, and that the adaptation of fundamental legal principles to the advancing demands of modern society, both through legislation and through judicial decision, furnishes a field for research and investigation which demands the highest type of scholarship and training. ”

“ There is no doubt that the United States have been in advance of England both in providing means of legal education and in requiring their use. The length of the course of study now established at our older Law Schools—three years—seems all that can reasonably be exacted, if a proper foundation of general discipline and knowledge has been previously laid. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let us demonstrate the application of the law again showing how interest may be developed in a specific college subject. Let us choose one that is generally regarded as so "difficult" and "abstract" that not many people are interested in it—philology, the study of language as a science. Let us imagine that we are trying to interest a student of law in this. As a first step we shall select some legal term and show what philology can tell about it. A term frequently encountered in law is indenture—a certain form of contract. ”

“ Collective bargaining is likely to compel us to think over again the whole subject of juristic personality in Anglo-American law. Criminal law and procedure call for the best efforts of thoroughly trained common-law lawyers acquainted with the social science of today.... For much that we have had to study and to teach in the immediate past is already yielding in importance to these new elements in the legal system. ”

“ But there are equally good legal reasons for our decision. In addition the subject matter almost compels us to act because public education is one of the most important services provided by state government. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not only has the average lawyer become a less representative citizen, but a strictly legal training has become a less desirable preparation for the candid consideration of contemporary political problems. ”

“ As is true of many problems in the law, the answer is to be found not in legal learning but in the realities of the record. Though variously expressed in the decisions, the governing principles are clear. ”

“ There is another circumstance which facilitates the progress of the teacher. It is a fact that all this general progress has a direct and immediate bearing upon his pursuits. A lawyer may read in an evening an interesting book of travels, and find nothing to help him with his case, the next day, in court,—but almost every fact which the teacher thus learns, will come at once into use, in some of his recitations at school. We do not mean to imply by this that the members of the legal profession have not need of a great variety and extent of knowledge; they doubtless have. ”

“ These purposes and, to a certain extent, these problems, the student of law must investigate; to stand outside, refusing to touch them, invites fatal criticism. We should say, then, that the scientific treatment of law includes the analysis and classification of legal conceptions; inquiry into the origin and evolution of legal institutions; and the theory of legislation. Prof. Amos adopts this view, and it colors every chapter of his work. ”

“ Article 18 Schools shall employ full-time or part-time teachers to engage in the rule of law education, and may employ vice principals and out-of-school legal counsellors in charge of the rule of law education from judicial and law enforcement organs, legal education and legal service institutions, and other entities. ”

“ Indeed it is really amazing, that there should be no other state of life, no other occupation, art, or science, in which some method of instruction is not looked upon as requisite, except only the science of legislation, the noblest and most difficult of any. ”

“ As one means to this end it has been the practice of different States, from time immemorial, to exact in many pursuits a certain degree of skill and learning upon which the community may confidently rely, their possession being generally ascertained upon an examination of parties by competent persons, or inferred from a certificate to them in the form of a diploma or license from an institution established for instruction on the subjects, scientific and otherwise, with which such pursuits have to deal. ”

“ PRACTISING lawyers in so progressive a country as America are continually met with new devices, with new legal situations, with want of remedies, for which neither the text-books nor their legal education afford them precedent or direct advice ”

“ Hence it may be a measure of policy with them, to introduce the student, in the first place, to the study of political law, in the hope of making on his raw and unpractised mind, such an impression, as may secure his approbation of the existing order of things. The faculty of investigating legal questions, and forming legal opinions, may almost be regarded as an acquired faculty; so that, in the earlier part of his researches, the student necessarily acquiesces in the doctrines which are pronounced ex cathedra by his teacher. ”

“ They begin to think of themselves as belonging to a profession, with a feeling of responsibility for training the novices who sat in court to learn court procedures and attorney techniques. They invited these students to supper at the Inns of Court for the purpose of arguing about the day's cases. The Inns of Court evolved a scheme of legal education, which was oral and used disputations. Thus they became educational institutions as well as clubs for practicing attorneys. ”

“ In the first place, the object of a law school must be to teach law, and this is not quite the same thing as teaching the history of law. We should not wish to see a professor of law breaking and entering the close of the professor of history, though the result of our scheme of Triposes may be that legal history falls to the ground between two schools. Secondly, I believe that any one who aspires to study legal history should begin by studying modern law. ”

“ We must therefore apply the rule that where an instruction embodies several propositions of law, to some of which no objection properly could be taken, a general exception to the entire instruction will not entitle the exceptor to take advantage of a mistake or error in some single or minor proposition therein. ”

“ Should one general exception to 13 different instructions be considered sufficient, when each instruction consists of different propositions of law and fact, and many of them are clearly correct? We think not. ”

“ The function such groups serve is a rationalizing one and their power flows from and is limited to their ability to convince by arguments from generally agreed upon premises. They are exercising the techniques and knowledge which lawyers are trained to possess in the task of solving problems with which the legal profession is most familiar. ”

“ Educational obligation.—The duty to instruct children results from the natural relations between parents and children. The obligation to raise children implies, in fact, the obligation to instruct them. There is no more education without instruction than instruction without education. To-day educational obligation is inserted in the law, and has its sanction therein. But parents owe it to themselves to obey the law without constraint. ”

“ It is further provided that "the said justices of the peace, or other judicial officer, shall, in all cases, at their discretion, in place of the fine aforesaid, be authorized to order children proved before them to be growing up in truancy, and without the benefit of the education provided for them by law, to be placed, for such periods of time as they may judge expedient, in such institution of instruction, or house of reformation, or other suitable situation, as may be assigned or provided for the purpose in each city or town availing itself of the powers herein granted." ”

“ I have often longed that every school-boy and girl should be taught and well-grounded in these great principles. It would not be a difficult nor a dry study, for like all great things, these principles are simple, straight, and clear as the day. It is when, we come to intricacies and technicalities of laws, even though based on these great fundamental lines, that the study becomes dry, useful to the professional lawyer, but not to the pupil in school or the public generally. ”

“ Now, on the new system of our Experimentalist, the very laws and regulations, which are in any case necessary to the going on of a school, have such an origin and are so administered as to cultivate the sense of justice and materially to enlarge the knowledge of justice. ”

“ It is believed that this requirement would be two severe, as many persons not specially trained in the law and without any particular educational advantages may by careful study of the practice and of the useful arts learn adequately to prosecute applications. ”

“ The tendency is toward bulky volumes. Meanwhile other subjects than constitutional law,—othervii branches of the law,—must be pursued. Multiplicity of subjects is characteristic of the curriculum whether at Law School or at College or University. Time is brief: studies are many. ”

“ We are, of course, far from supposing that every British subject who can read is to peruse the vast 30 library which the British Acts of themselves compose; but we hold that education forms the only direct means through which written law, as a regulator of conduct, can be known, and that, in consequence, in its practical breadth and average aspect, it is only educated men who know it, and only uneducated men who are ignorant of it. And hence the derivation of the magistrate’s judicial right and duty. ”

“ The judgment and discretion in determining on skill, learning, and sufficiency to practise physic, is trusted to the College, and the Court will not interrupt them in the due and proper exercise of it. ”

“ The training of lawyers is a training in logic. The processes of analogy, discrimination, and deduction are those in which they are most at home. The language of judicial decision is mainly the language of logic. ”

“ The student has not only to make himself acquainted with the elements and principles of English law, maritime, civil and criminal, but he has to acquire a knowledge of the laws of the particular state in which he practices, and to know what the courts of the different states have decided, where he does not practice. ”

“ That young man had really learned something worth far more than the cost of his course in the college of law.
There is, perhaps, no other of the so-called learned professions which is so exacting and which requires more devotion and study for its mastery. Some of the brightest men in this country have devoted a lifetime to the study and practice of law, only to have just entered its broad field as they have been compelled to lay down their work. How futile, then, would be the attempt to make every man his own lawyer! ”