Legal Education

Probably a step in the direction of this ideal, which would meet with little opposition, would be improved co-ordination of the teaching faculties given by university and professional bodies, and an extension of existing faculties so as to assist oversea lawyers both in instruction and research. Should legal education be con fined, as it practically is now, to students who intend in one form or another to practise the profession of the law? This is too large a subject to be discussed in this article. There are some who hold that it would be to the public advantage that some knowledge of legal principles should form part of a general liberal education as it did in England in the 14th and 15th centuries. The education of a citizen. it is thought, should include some knowledge of the law which holds the State together and governs all his relations with it. Suspicion of the law as a mysterious and unintelligible force would be dispelled. Elementary difficulties in the affairs of life : in dealing with servants, making contracts and disposing of property, might be avoided. Some steps in this direction are being taken by the University of London which has made ele mentary law an optional subject in some of its Arts courses. There appears to be a wide field for an extension of legal educa tion in this direction.

American legal education begins in 1784 (or perhaps 1782), when Judge Tapping Reeve of Litchfield, Conn., set up the first school for the teaching of the common law.

Early History.

There had been no legal profession in the colonies until the i8th century. Before the revolution a certain number of lawyers had received their training in England, in the inns of court. But a system of courts, manned by lawyers and requiring a trained profession to practise before them, was not called for by the economic condition of the colonies until toward the middle of that century; nor were the executive and legislative justice, characteristic of the colonial polity, wholly superseded by judicial justice until after the revolution. Legal education was at a low ebb in i8th century England. The uni versities had never taught the law of the land. The mediaeval system of the Inns of Court had decayed, and the system that now obtains had not been set up. Hence there were no good models at hand after the revolution, and American legal educa tion had to develop its own methods. So far as the models were English, they were, first, the purely apprentice training of the lower branch of the profession in England (for in general the United States took the attorney or solicitor for its type, rather than the barrister), and, second, the academic lectures on the law of the land which began with Blackstone's lectures as Vin erian professor at Oxford. This example was followed eagerly in America. Wythe's lectures at William and Mary (1779), Wilson's at the College of Philadelphia, now the University of Pennsylvania (179o), Kent's at Columbia (1793) and Parker's at Harvard (1815) were of this type. They were not instruction

in law to prospective lawyers so much as lectures to young gen tlemen as part of their general cultural training. Later this plan of academic lectures upon law was grafted upon the appren tice training which was the first type of legal education in America.

After the Revolution, students ceased to go from America to the inns of court. Then education for the bar became dis tinctly American. Beginning from this point, three stages of development may be distinguished. These stages correspond to three periods in American legal history. The method of each stage is a response to the needs of the period in which it grew up.

Apprentice Training.

First, there is a stage of apprentice training, either in the office of a practising lawyer or in a law school organized as an expanded law office and applying office methods of instruction. This sort of training sufficed for the needs of the time immediately after the Revolution. The de velopment of judicial justice administered in courts by trained judges called for practitioners who knew the lawyer's craft. When the United States took over English law as the law of its several commonwealths, in the first instance it took over English legal procedure. Except for land law, at the time of the Revolution the greater part of English law was expressed in terms of procedure. Thus there was need of lawyers who knew how to bring a lawsuit and how to conduct it through the courts. Ap prentice training was adapted to this need. Judge Reeve's law school grew out of the practice of taking a number of students into a country law office where the press of business did not interfere with instruction. Just because it grew out of such a law office, the exact date of establishment of the school at Litch field cannot be fixed.

The law schools of the period were modelled on that institu tion. In effect, they were but expanded law offices in which pre ceptors who were practising lawyers carried on the teaching side of the law office as their chief activity. Such was the Harvard law school, the oldest of the existing law schools in the United States, in its first stage (1817-29).

At this time there was little differentiation of local law. But the whole tendency of the apprentice training was to dwell upon the local and temporary rather than the universal and enduring elements in the body of legal materials, and this unfortunate feature served to develop and entrench many provincialisms in the law of the several States, since, until, much later, the bulk of the profession was apprentice trained. In general the first stage prevailed until Joseph Story began to teach law at Harvard (1829). Also in many parts of the country the simpler needs of a rural or even pioneer society required nothing more than an apprentice-trained profession, so that the method of that stage has persisted in many localities into the present.