Berkeley High School - Olla Podrida Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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OLLA PODRIDA BERKELEY HIGH causes and reasons why this is so, I believe the most powerful reason would be found to be the lack of proper preparatory education. Up to a certain point in the practice of the law, this lack of a thorough early education does not become so apparent, but when the test comes, requiring well developed reasoning powers, broad acquaintance with all intellectual effort and a confidence born of that knowledge which is power, the man with the broad foundation of a thorough early educa- tion has a great advantage. I do not mean to underrate self-made men. The rare in- stances of truly self-made men simply prove the rule for which I am contending ; that is to say, a burning ambition to acquire knowledge, coupled with indefatigable industry, will light the lamp of genius in any branch of intellectual effort. Such men become notable successes in the law as elsewhere. But taking the average man, if the mind can be built on the basis of a thorough collegiate education, it advances to the study of the law with a developed intellectual power that, except in the rare instances mentioned, will not come otherwise. In addition to a thorough collegiate preparation for the study of law, I recommend strongly one or two years actual business experience. I would let this experience follow the collegiate degree and precede the study of law. The modern practice of the law has been well termed a technical business, rather than, as in former times, a pure profession. The time was when a lawyer was engaged in expounding constitutional questions, pleading special causes of great moment involving the art of forensic oratory and the elucidation of purely legal questions. Today, the overwhelming proportion of the work of a successful practitioner is in furnishing technical advice on great corporate, transportation, mercantile and industrial questions. To properly understand and cope with that portion of such questions as comes within the lawyer ' s province, a practical working knowledge of business methods is in the highest degree important and useful. Another most important prerequisite for a successful law- yer is the capacity for continued and untiring industry. In the modern practiec of law, brilliant and special gifts play small part, and it is the old fable of the hare and the tortoise 17

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OLLA PODRID A BERKELEY HIGH A Word to Prospective Lawyers By Robert Treat Piatt. Of the Portland, Oregon, Bar. Every person, man or boy, who has chosen a life vocation, should couple with that choice a resolution that he will reach the topmost round of the ladd er of success in that chosen voca- tion. Every line of work has its separate and distinct stan- dard of success in the truest and highest sense. Mere posses- sion of great wealth, or of great power, or of great learning, do not of themselves epitomize the highest success in the truest and best sense of the word. In the profession of the law an adequate conception of the highest success could be expressed, perhaps, by saying of any lawyer that he not only commanded a grieat clientage, re- ceived a large income and was a leader at the Bar. but that- in addition to all these qualities, he possessed a mind not only richly stored with intellectual, historical and legal resources, but that he was permeated with a great moral purpose which always made his intellectuality honest, his historical knowl- edge accurate, and his legal learning sound and wholesome. Such a lawyer would never use the force of his powerful stand- ing to persuade a judge, of lesser intellectual calibre, to the adoption of a doctrine which his own intellectual powers knew was not a true and honest doctrine. Of such a lawyer it could always be said that he was faithful to the law in its highest sense. To become such a lawyer should be the ambition of every student of the law. To become such a lawyer, the founda- tions should be laid of purely intellectual achievement, both broad and deep. Strictly speaking, no high school student has any right or license to be considering the problem of legal study. He should first lay the broad and deep foundations of 3 thorough collegiate education, and then it will be time for. him to consider the particular problems of legal study. The rank and file of every profession is made up of men who have not achieved any substantial success, either material or intellectual. If an examination could be made into the 16

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OLLA PODRID A repeated a thousand-fold. The lawyer of limited intellectual powers, thoroughly educated and with untiring industry, makes the great success today. Of course, the question of temperament should not be over- looked. A boy with a distaste for study, but with a natural inventive and mechanical genius, has no place in the legal profession. Do not spoil a good carpenter to make a poor lawyer. There is no profession or line of work where moderate talent, coupled with a thorough education and great industry, will present a more assured future than in the pratcice of the law. It is not, however, a profession of large financial returns. If a boy has the ambition to possess great wealth, he cannot expect to achieve it in any profession, except through some exceptional circumstances, but there are rewards in the prac- tice of the profession of the law, as indicated in the definition of success previously given in this article, which are beyond and above mere dollars and cents. When you realize that life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness are all possible, and only possible because of the great legal bulwarks that have been built against man ' s rapacity and man ' s inhumanity to man ; when you realize that as a lawyer you are one of the elect class set apart in the community to maintain those bul- Avarks ; when you realize that you are one of that great galaxy of constitution makers and expounders, of judges and law- makers that make our Anglo-Saxon world the happy world that it is to live in. then you get some glimpse of the compen- sations which come to the lawyer who is giving his life to the Republic to conserve the best that we have and to reach out for the best there is to be acquired to make more untrammeled and secure that pursuit of life, liberty, property and happiness. BERKELEY HIGH 18