It is a matter of singular interest that with the steadily advancing standard of entrance re quirements, there has followed an almost equiv alent decline in the importance of a diploma of graduation from a law school as a factor in securing admission to the bar. Formerly, in many jurisdictions, such a diploma was by statute an immediate passport to the practice of the profession, but with the stiffening of the educational requirements demanded of the law student there has most fortunately concurred a quickening of the conscience of the courts as to their duties and responsibilities in the prem ises; with the result that the sound judgment of lawyers and legal educators has been gradu ally led to endorse the proposition that it is neither logical nor desirable for schools of law in no way subject to the supervision of the courts to possess the unrestricted power to create officers thereof. The influence of the American Bar Association and its junior organ ization, the Association of American Law Schools, has for some years been steadily and wisely directed to securing the abolition of the exercise by law schools of this power, which should properly be exercisable only by the courts. While there can be no doubt of the eventual establishment of this reform univer sally, a law school diploma still admits to the bar in the States of Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
In many of the States this matter has now been wisely regulated by placing the matter of admission to the practice of law exclusively within the jurisdiction of State boards of law examiners, the members of such boards being usually appointed in rotation for fixed terms by the justices of the highest appellate courts of the respective States.
As the American school of law was prac tically compelled to construct its own road to success, it is not unnatural that there should have arisen considerable divergence of opinion and of practice in the matter of methods of instruction. Roughly, it may be said that three systems have prevailed; a system of instruction by lectures and dictation; a system of instruc tion by the study of and recitation from pre scribed textbooks of authority; and a system of instruction confined largely to the reading and expounding of selected cases of leading import ance, indicated by the instructor, through which the student is encouraged to delve for a inas tery of the principles involved. The latter method, first generally introduced on a scientific basis by Prof. C. C. Langdell, Dane professor of law at Harvard, and since greatly elaborated by his colleagues, Profs. James Barr Ames,
Joseph H. Beale, Jr., and Samuel R. Williston, as well as by Prof. W. A. Keener, of Columbia, and Prof. Ernest Huffcut, of Cornell, may be justly considered the prevailing system in our law schools of to-day, although justice requires the statement that none of these methods is or ever has been exclusive of the others, but rather that the curriculum of every well directed law school in the present, as in the past, has ever included a greater or less pro portion of attention to each of these systems.
No review of the history of American law schools would be just or complete which failed to note the remarkable debt under which the practice and the administration of law in this country has been placed by the contributions to legal literature made by members of their vari ous faculties in the form of standard textbooks, usually, if not universally, the outgrowth of carefully prepared courses of lectures primarily designed solely for the guidance of their stu dent bodies. Reeve's on 'Domestic Relations,' Gould on 'Pleading' and Kent's taries on American Law' have already been instanced. Story's treatises on the of Constitutional Law> and on 'Equity Juris prudence' ; • Greenleaf's exhaustive summariza tion of the law of evidence and Parsons' great work on the 'Law of Contracts' constitute three monuments of this sort which alone would re flect imperishable renown on the Harvard Law School could it point to no other ground of claim to its present distinction. And an inter esting parallelism subsists between the facts that, as it was the donation to Oxford by Viner of the profits of his compendious abridgment of English law which furnished the foundation of the Vinerian professorship, the first and greatest fruit of which was the elaboration by Sir William Blackstone of his course of lec tures into the imperishable 'Commentaries on the Law of England,' so it was the donation to Harvard by Dane of the profits of his later abridgment of law which directly stimulated the production of Joseph Story's masterly work on 'Equity Jurisprudence.' Other notable instances of legal authorship in point are the great work on 'Constitutional Limitations,' by Judge Cooley of the law School of the University of Michigan, the elaborate and finished analysis of private international law by Prof. Raleigh C. Minor of the University of Virginia, and the learned exposition of the 'Law of Estoppel' by Melville M. Bigelow, of the 'Law of Wills and Administration,' by James Schouler, and of the 'Law of Wills.' by George Enos Gardner, of Boston University.