NORBERT WIENER.
LAW, American Schools of. Among the notable features of educational progress in the United States during the 19th century, there was, possibly, none more remarkable in scope or destined to exert weightier influence upon the future of the nation than the marvelous in crease in number and growth in importance of our American schools of law. That this statement is conservative rather than extrav agant is demonstrated by the fact that while at the opening of that century there existed in our nation but a single professional law school — and that a private enterprise which never conferred a degree — at its close, more than 100 publicly chartered academic institutions were given official recognition as such by the national commissioner of education.
And the American school of law is to-day an institution peculiar to itself, for the reason that there existed in the mother country from which our common law and so large a propor tion of our earlier statute law, as well as the formal machinery of our administration of justice, were derived, no similar scholastic or ganizations which could serve as the i development of a system of instruction in jurisprudence.
Among the Continental nations of Europe, of course, and particularly among races of Latin derivation, schools of law had been firmly established from a period of remote antiquity and were held in exalted importance.
Thus, great schools of jurisprudence flour ished, long prior, even to the time of Justinian, at Berytus, Rome and Constantinople, and be came especial objects of the sedulous watch, care and protection of that great emperor to .whose enlightened supervision the Roman law owed its systematization and codification at the hands of Tribonian and his colleagues. Al though, in the earlier period of Roman history and under the republic, the youthful student who aspired to master the principles of juris prudence usually attached himself to some law yer of prominence from whose discourse and practice he might acquire the desired knowl edge, this custom became obsolete to the degree that, under the emperors, nowhere in Rome's vast domain, outside of these three schools, of which the Sidonia-n was pre-eminently the most famous and successful, was professional in struction in law permitted to be given.
The impetus given by these law schools of antiquity, not alone to the study of legal principles but to the cause of learning in all branches, was incalculable. And, similarly, the renaissance of modern education has been justly held to date from the successful effort of Irnerius, at the dawn of the 12th century, to revive scholastic interest in the juridical learning of the civilians. This notable scholar and teacher, himself an alumnus of Constanti nople, by the establishment, under the auspices of Frederick I of Germany and at the sugges tion of Hildebrand's friend, the Countess Ma tilda, of his wonderfully successful lectureship on the Corpus Juris Civilis, provided the actual nucleus around which was eventually assembled the great university of Bologna, forerunner of all modern institutions of the kind.
But such was the history of the growth of the English common-law that slight parallelism existed between the methods by which instruc tion in its principles and practice could he gained by the neophyte and those open to stu dents of legal science in Continental countries and especially among peoples whose jurispru dence was derived from or dominated by the elementary fundamentals of the Roman civil taw. Thus, while elaborate and erudite courses in the history and principles of jurisprudence, ancient and modern, including both the canon and the civil law, have for centuries figured prominently in the curricula of the two great English universities, neither the highest profi ciency in their scholarship nor any degree in law conferred by Oxford or Cambridge ever led to the bar in England. On the contrary, the wardship of the door to the practice of the legal profession in our mother country has ever been in the keeping of the Inns of Court, curi ous bodies politic which, while neither hostelries nor seminaries, partook in some respects of the nature of both, and have remained the peculiar custodians of instruction in the arcana of com mon-law practice and pleading.