College Teaching.—A second stage begins with the appoint ment of Story as Dane professor at Harvard, and extends until the epoch-making work of Langdell after 187o. There was noth ing in the way of a rule-of-thumb apprentice training, which, under 19th-century conditions, could be done better in a law school than in a law office. But with the growth of the law some thing more than a rule-of-thumb training in practice was re quired, and the second stage of legal education was a response. From Story to Langdell the law schools continually increased in influence. The accepted mode of training came to be study in a law school in which law was taught by lectures and from text-books with the teaching apparatus of the old-time college.
The era of expansion that followed the adoption of the Con stitution called for creative juristic activity and creative legis lation. Study of substantive law was called for. It was necessary to investigate each item of the common law of England with reference to its applicability to the conditions in the New World. The traditional materials of 17th-century English law had to be reshaped so as to make of them a common law for America. A mere apprentice training could not meet these demands. Text books had to be written to guide the courts in the new depart ments of law, which were formative on every hand. These text books came from the law schools and soon gained the upper hand as the bases of instruction, even where the whole spirit of instruction remained that of the first stage. The best examples of the second stage are the teaching of Story and Greenleaf, and later of Parsons, Washburn and Parker at Harvard, the teaching of Dwight at Columbia, and of Cooley and his colleagues at Michigan.
Scientific Study of Jurisprudence.—In a third stage there is scientific study of the legal system of English-speaking coun tries on the basis of the sources. An analytical and a historical method, as methods of a general science of law, are applied to the sources, and thus system is put into each branch and depart ment of the law. By the time of the Civil War the formative period of American law and legal institutions was substantially at an end. With few exceptions, the great text-books that had guided the courts speak from before the Civil War. In the last
quarter of the i9th century, law books tend more and more to be mere indexes to the decisions : they cease to be creative. The need of the time had come to be in another direction.
Now there was need of systematizing the law which had de veloped in the period of growth. In response to this demand, within less than a decade after the end of the Civil War, Langdell, who was appointed to Story's chair at Harvard in 187o, had in augurated the method of study from adjudicated cases which has come to prevail in the majority of American law schools of high grade. This method seeks, through analytical and historical study of the sources, to give a grasp of the traditional art of deciding cases on the basis of reported judicial experience. It teaches the traditional art of developing grounds of decision from the au thoritative legal materials. This is the enduring element in Anglo-American law. Conditions in many localities, in which requirements for admission to the bar are low, and candidates have insufficient preliminary training to enable them to study the sources directly, have led to persistence of the method of lectures and text-book instruction in schools in which the teachers are actively engaged in practice, and hence the spirit is that of ap prentice training. In such schools local law and procedure are chiefly stressed. Probably 6o% of those who come to the bar to-day are trained in such schools.
Perhaps it is too soon to speak with assurance, but there are signs of a fourth stage, called for by the economic unification of the country, if not of. the world, the growing importance of comparative law, and the increasing need of creative lawmaking and consequent demand for something more than the analytical and historical methods of the last half of the i9th century. Re search professorships and research institutes are being set up in a number of university law schools, and an institute estab lished at Johns Hopkins in 1928 plans to train writers, legal thinkers and law-makers rather than practising lawyers. Mean while the American Bar Association is pushing steadily for the requirements as to preliminary education and the scientific train ing developed in the third stage. (R. Po.)