Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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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 In the past few years hitherto unpublished documents have been unearthed in the Harvard archives which reveal considerable information concerning details of the founding of the Law School and the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

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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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Recently certain original documents relating to the founding of the Harvard Law School have been found in the University Library. They are: fll A draft of uStatutes of the Professorship of Law in Harvard University, dated April 17, 1816, and signed by Isaac Parker, then Chief Justice of Massachu- setts and Royall Professor of Lawg f2J a project for the establishment of a law school as a department of the University, in the handwriting of Chief Justice Parker, signed by him, and dated in another hand May 14-, 1817, tm the minutes of the Corporation authorizing the establishment of the Law Schoolgl fllfl a memorandum of a vote of the corporation on May 14, 1817, as to payment of tuition by law students, their privileges and duties, and disposition of the tuition fees, l51 a letter of Asahel Stearns to President Kirkland, accepting appointment as University Professor of Law, dated July 5, 181732 f61 a letter from Professor Stearns to President Kirkland enclosing a draft notice of the opening of the Law Schoolzi' and f7'l the draft notice referred to in Mr. Stearns's letter? It may be well to recall the circumstances under which Chief Justice Parker con- ceived the project of a law school as a department of the University. After, in consequence of the Revolution, American students ceased to go to London to the Inns of Court, an apprenticeship to a practising lawyer was the only form of train- ing for the profession. Certain lawyers in different communities got reputations as good teachers and their offices were resorted to by students. Some of these lawyers had many pupils and the first American law school, the school of Judge Tapping Reeve at Litchfield, Connecticut, conducted from 1784 till 1833, was in origin the ofiice of a practitioner in which the major activity had come to be teaching. ln the meantime another type of law' teaching had grown up parallel with the apprentice school. The Vinerian professorship at Oxford, from which came l3lackstone's Com- mentaries on the Laws of England, attracted the attention of Americans and was taken for a model in this country from the very beginning of independence. The professorship established for George Wythe at Vlfilliam and Mary in 1779-80, that for James Wilsori at the College of Philadelphia in 1790, and that for James Kent at Columbia in 1793 were set up on the plan of Blackstone's introductory lecture. They were lectureships for general audiences, not merely for law students. James Wi1soni's lectures were mostly taken up with political philosophy, were said to be addressed to gentlemen of all professionsf' and to aim at informing the legislator and the magistrate as well as the lawyer. Kent began by saying that he would set forth nothing ubut what may be usefully known by every gentleman of polite education. The professorship of law at Harvard endowed by the will of lsaac Hoyall fdied 17815, to which Chief Justice Parker was appointed in 1815, was of this sort. Thus there were general university lectures for the general student, the cultivated public, and the law student alike, and outside of educational institutions was an apprentice training in a lawyer's ofhce. 1These minutes are reproduced on page 18. 3Tl1is letter is reproduced on page 21. 'Thisleuer E reproduced on page 21. divas nodce E reproduced on page 23 f20l