Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

Page 22 text:

A Sketch of the History of Harvard Law Sehoolxei By Rorroe Pound With an unbroken continuity of operation as teaching school since 1817, the Harvard Law School is the oldest of the existing law schools in the United States. Before the Revolution a certain number of those who were preparing for the practice of law in America went to the Inns of Court. But mostly law students had a course of reading laid out for them by a friend or a preceptor, or underwent an apprenticeship in the office of a practitioner. It was not till the present century that apprentice training of lawyers became obsolete and the majority of those who came to the bar came to be school trained. The stages in the development of the Law School mark periods in American legal education, and correspond to well-marked periods in the history of American law. American law schools have a twofold origin: professorships founded in the latter part of the eighteenth century in imitation of Blackstone's chair at Oxford, and law ofhces in which the preceptorial function developed at the expense of law practice. The Harvard Law School derived from both. First as a point of origin is the Royall Professorship, provided for by the will of Isaac Royall fd. 1781j, but not established till 1815. Royall's will was executed in 1778, and to that extent he was a pioneer. But before his gift became available a number of professorships on the model of Blackstone's chair had been set up elsewhere. None survived the eighteenth century. The Royall Professorship, on the other hand, within two years became merged in the Harvard Law School, and has had a continuous existence from its foundation. In his inaugural lecture as Royall Professor, Chiefjustice Parker of Massachusetts expressed the hope that at some time in the future a school for the instruction of resident graduates in jurisprudence might be added to the professorship. For his was not a reaching chair. Like Wythe at William and Mary 0779-80j,James Wilson at the College of Philadelphia f1790j, and Kent at Columbia f1793j, he lectured to such college seniors, resident graduates, and occasional lookers-in from the local bar, as chose to hear him. A year later QMay 17, 18175 Parker laid before the Corporation a plan for a law school. It was adopted by a vote appointing Asahel Stearns University Professor of Law, who was to live in Cambridge and open and keep a school. He was to prescribe a course of study, confer with the students and examine them, read appropriate lectures, and act as a tutor. For this chair the school of Tapping Reeve at Litchfield, Connecticut, was the model as clearly as the Vinerian Professorship at Oxford was th model for Parker's chair. -I udge Reeve's school at Litchfield began about 1784. To the end it was an expanded law OFF1 ce. The students copied precedents of pleadings and of conveyances, and read such books as were at hand, exactly as did apprentices in lawyers' oiiices. The chief difference, aside from the greater number of students, was that, instead of occasional conferences between preceptor and student, the teachers dictated lectures which, before the days of many printed text books, were in effect text books of the law. The school which Asahel Stearns set up at Harvard in 1817 was of this sort. Yet in its possibilities it was much more. There had been professorships of 'Abridged by Professor Pound with permission of the Harvard University Press from his account, chap. xxx, The Law School, 1817-1929, in Morison, The Deifelopmefzt of Harvard Uniifwzrily Since lhe Inaugurullrm ufPre.ridef1l Eliot. IReprinted from the 1937-38 Harvard Law School Yearbook with substitution and additions of editor's notes. l20l

Page 21 text:

ww ffiomwk S FD wa wtf H FT 1 FEE

Page 23 text:

law in colleges without law teaching, and teaching of law in schools which in spirit and method were but law offices. Uniting the two ideas, combining the English idea of apprentice training with the continental idea of academic law teaching, as suggested by the Vinerian chair at Oxford, the Harvard Law School was the first university school of law in any common-law land. To the Litchfield sort of school it added a moot court, after the manner of the Inns of Court, and lec- tures by a university professor. Its possibilities were in the direction of an academic professional school, as contrasted with the purely academic law schools of Continental Europe, and the purely professional legal education which prevailed in England. It was the beginning of what has become a distinctively American type. A school of the Litchfield kind was suited to the condition of American law in the period immediately after the Revolution. In that period the task of legal education was simple. It was no more than to provide competent practitioners in the courts at a time when the chief work of the lawyer was in the trial of causes. Knowledge of the local procedure and ability to move juries were sufficient professional equipment. As yet there was no special requirement of anything which a law school could do better than a law office. Yet the Harvard Law School of this era did succeed in doing something more. At the end of the first decade Stearns could say with truth that he had raised the general standard of professional education by introducing a more methodical and thorough course of instruction. The course of reading and instruction at Harvard was adopted by other schools as well as by private preceptors, and no less than sixty members of the bar in different states had used it for a model. Thus the influence of the School upon legal education began at the outset. Change from a professional school under the eaves of a university to an academic professional school came with the appointment of-Ioseph Story as Dane Professor in 1829. By this time a new need had become manifest. English law could not be received exactly as it stood in the English books. There was need of legal provision for many things which were not dealt with by English legislation and which English judges had had no occasion to consider. Much in the English law had been given shape for conditions widely different from ours. It was needful to develop a system of law adapted to a new and growing country, to work out certain and detailed legal precepts equal to the requirements of American life. Apprentice- trained lawyers, knowing chiefly the mechanics of procedure and thinking locally, could not meet this demand, only law schools and law teachers could. Story was a common-law lawyer, and the traditions of English legal teaching en- sured that a law school under his guidance would be a professional school. But the philosophical ideas of the time in which Story was trained ensured that a school over which he presided would be a school of law, not a lawyer's office teaching rules of thumb. Also Story's zealous exposi- tion ofthe doctrines of English law in the light of a natural-law philosophy and of comparative law, enabled the school in which he taught to remain a school of common law. From Story to the American law schools of today is a continuous evolution. It has given us a system of legal education which grows out of and expresses the spirit of our law as completely as the Continental system expresses the spirit of the modern Roman law, and as the English system expressed the spirit of the medieval common law. Nathan Dane, in 1825, had the vision to see what was needed, and his endowment of the Dane professorship for Story was a turning point in American legal education. The re- sulting treatises, representing Story's teaching, met the need for an American development of equity and commercial law on the basis of English law, with the help of comparative law and rational philosophical speculation. Also Story's treatises made it possible for new American i2ll