Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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The minutes of a meeting of the Corporation on May 14, 1817, at which il was voted to establish the Harvard Law School. 8

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W THE FIIUNDING 0F THE HARVARD LAW SCHO0L

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The Founding of the Harvard Law School fNote-The Harvard Law School was founded in I 1817. Its growth ovcr a period of 122 years has been 1 in close accord with the original aims and purposes for which it was established. It is of interest, therefore, to the fourteen hundred students now in the School as well as to its thousands of graduates to know some of the details concerning thc background of its founding -the significance of which can be traced in the devel- opment of the School down to the present time. Even before the establishment of the Law School as a separate department of the University, the study of law had been a part of the Harvard curriculum. Chief Justice Parker of the Massachusetts Court was ROSCOE POUND named Hoyall Professor of Law in 1815 and as such conducted lectures in the University. The nature of his work and the methods he used cleared the way for the establishment of what is today the oldest law school in the United States. In the past few years hitherto unpublished documents have been unearthed in the Harvard archives which reveal considerable information concerning details of the founding of the Law School and the appointment of Asahel Stearns as its first head, or University Professor, as the post was then called. The YEAR BOOK Com- mittee takes pleasure in reproducing some of these original manuscripts which now f'01'H1-Z1 definite part of the historical record of the Law' School. It is our hope that they will portray for the student body the small beginnings out of which arose an institution training 111-00 men yearly in the Law. In these documents Harvard Law men can Hnd set out the initial purposes and expectations of those early pioneers of law teaching which have had such widespread and fruitful results in the century and a quarter that has passed since the Corporation of Harvard College on May 14, 1817, first resolved lo open and keep a School . . . for the instruction of Students at Law. Roscoe Pound was Dean of the Law School during an important period in its later development fl.916-19361. A distinguished legal scholar, Dean Pound has made a study of the history of the School and for the 1937-38 volume of this YEAR BOOK wrote A Sketch of the History of the Harvard Law Schoolf, In the article which follows he again discusses its establishment, in the light of the documentary evidence now available, and with respect to its importance and signihcance in the later development of the School.-Editorjj 1191