Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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means completed. The changes reflect a change in the position and function of law- yers in the community. At one time they were primarily family solicitors and forensic advocates, and legal education was designed for fitting men to perform these tasks. These functions are still performed by law- yers, and they must not be ignored in train- ing. But lawyers today are also extensively engaged as business advisers, and have to deal constantly with many aspects of gov- ernment regulations not even thought of a few decades ago. To meet these new demands, new subject matters have been added to the curriculum, old courses have been adjusted, often at great pain, to make way for the changes, new materials have been developed, and new teaching methods experimented with. There is clearly a ferment in the faculty on all of these matters, and out of it will come more developments and more changes-which will surely make the next half century of legal education as interesting as the last has been. 2. Faculty. The next area of develop- ment is closely related to the last. There have already been significant developments cent larger than it was before the war. Not more. During the past year we have under- taken the Teaching Fellow program, with marked success. Counting the Teaching Fellows, our faculty is now about fifty per cent larger than before the war. Not counting the Teaching Fellows, nearly half of our faculty have been appointed within the past ten years, most of these since 1945. In making faculty selections, many fac- tors have been considered. Although the faculty is now perhaps as young in average age as it has been for many years, it stands rather high in practical experience. Some of this experience has been obtained in gov- ernment serviceg several of the new faculty members have had substantial experience in private practice of the typically strenuous sort. We may expect that new faculty members will continue to be persons who combine intellectual and teaching capacities with the ability to keep their feet on the ground. One of the factors which limits develop- ment of a faculty is, of course, the matter of finances. I think quite a case can be made for the proposition that Law Schools have long been among the stepchildren of education. To put a rather striking ex- ample-the Harvard Medical School spends not twice as much per student each year as is spent at the Law School, but seven times as much! Of course the problems are some- what different, but not that much differ- ent. Ways must be found to make it plain that adequate work in the fields of law and the social sciences generally requires finan- cial support of a sort far beyond that which has hitherto been available. Prograss of this sort may be slow, but I think we can count on developments over the years to come which will mean a continued strength- ening of the faculty and enlargement of its activities and resources. 3. Amelioration of the lot of students! The present generation of students will probably never admit it, but we have sof- tened up considerably in the past few years. Some of us still have a nostalgic yearning for the days when men were men. But they are apparently gone for good, and there will not be too much wailing at the change. The development of the highly selective admissions system has greatly re- duced the first year failure rate, and fail- ures at the end of the second and third years have all but disappeared. The Teach- ing Fellow program with its system of Group Work performs a great service in assisting the first year students at what has been regarded as their most confused and uncertain period in Law School. There is

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7 W, Y Developments Af Che auf School A story is told about one of the several occasions when the faculty of the Harvard Law School considered the question of ad- mission of women. This time was about 1913, when Ezra Ripley Thayer was dean. After some discussion, one of the members of the faculty, not known for his reticence, spoke up and said, If women are admitted to the School, I will have to revise all my lectures. There was a suitable pause. The dean is then reported to have said, Are there any other arguments in favor of the proposal? When one is speaking of changes at the Harvard Law School and the future course of its development, it will be impossible not to record that women were finally admitted to the School in the fall of 1950 falthough two were actually registered, in cooperation with Radcliffe College, as long ago as 1899, and attended classes for a few weeks until the arrangement was vetoed by the Corpor- ationj. Nevertheless, it does not seem to me that this particular development is either very important or very significant. Most of us have seen women from time to time during our lives, and have managed to sur- vive the shock. Wfe have even had a few around Langdell and Austin Halls for a good many years now, with no serious con- sequences. There seems to be no likelihood that we will have a very large proportion of women among our students. I think we can take it, and I doubt if it will change the character of the School or even its atmos- phere to any detectable extent. As of to- day, I doubt if this change alone will require nhl'- DEAN ERXVIN N. GRISWOLD any of our faculty members to revise many of their lectures. But there are some other developments in the air which do seem to me to be of great significance. As far as I know there are no plans for revolutionary change. I do not detect any notion that the Harvard Law School feels that it has devised a new formula for legal education, or that my brethren of the faculty propose throwing over all of the past and replacing it with some dazzling new-found approach to the law and legal education. Nevertheless, there are developments. Most of the lectures given in the School in 1913 would seem inadequate nowg while many of those now given would have struck the students of that earlier gener- ation as strange, vague, and far afield. Without meaning to be exhaustive, and without undertaking to foretell very much of the future, let me list below some of the significant developments which seem to me to be occurring in the Law School, at the middle of the twentieth century. 1. Teaching Materials and Meilaods. Law Schools have had to make some remarkable adjustments since fifty years ago. We are inclined to look back on those days as a relatively simple period, and we may well be right. Five courses in the first year, six in the second, six in the third, all standard courses, no Taxation, Labor Law, Adminis- trative Law, Accounting, no seminars, no papers, not much feeling that a lawyer needed to know anything but law, and that rather pure law, too. From such compari- sons, it is easy to see that we have made some changes, and those changes are clearly still in progress. Law schools now have available the same time for their task that they have had for the past seventy-five years or so. But the subject matter with which they must deal has greatly changed and increased. The necessary adjustments in teaching programs have not been easy to make and are by no

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some reduction in the number of students per faculty member, and many of the fac- ulty are perhaps more approachable than was the case in some years of the past. With the coming year, the new dormi- tory and dining room project will be an actuality, and that should go far toward developing a sense of unity among the stu- dents, and toward enhancing their feeling of being an essential part of the School. The new buildings will also have meeting rooms and common rooms, which will pro- vide added facilities for law club work, group meetings and other activities. No longer, I think, can it be said that the Harvard Law School has no interest in its students as individuals. That was never true in the past, but was doubtless some- times felt. It is true that the School has counted on self-reliance and individual re- sponsibility among its students, and it is hoped that that will remain its general pol- icy. But the School, with the generous aid and support of the University and of its a- lumni, has now taken significant steps to im- prove its facilities and modes of operation in areas in which there has been felt a lack. This was not done just to ease the lot of students. It includes no luxuries. The purpose of all of these developments has been to increase the educational facilities and opportunities of the School. The years to come will disclose the fruits of this program. A -nz , , 4. Development of effective research ac- tivities. The Harvard Law School has al- ways conducted research. Over the years much work of great importance to the law and to the country has come from its halls. Its faculty members as individuals have written many books, have drafted many statutes, have worked for many private and governmental organizations on tasks which had for their basic objectives the improve- ment of the law. In recent years, however, the needs and opportunities in the field of research have developed and changed. Twenty years ago many of the faculty were working on the Restatements of the Law. That was a new sort of undertaking, although it was still basically a library job. But it did involve the coordinated work of considerable groups of people. In the intervening years, at least two further research projects have been conducted under the auspices of the School. One was the important Research in Inter- national Law, of which Professor Hudson was the director. The other is the exten- sive work in criminology and juvenile de- linquency which has been done at the School for the past twenty years under the direction of Professor and Mrs. Glueck. Significant as this work has been, we have so far made scarcely a beginning on what ought to be done. The School should have a regularly established Division of Research, with a Director of Research who would spend all his time and energy on the research activities of the School. It should have a number of large scale research proj- ects under way at once. It should have the personnel and the facilities to under- take independent investigation of important problems where law plays a prominent role. It should be developing revisions of statutes in many fields, and making a constant pos- itive contribution to the improvement of our law. Only one who has actually cn- countered the problems in this field will know what a difficult task this is. But it is clearly a task of first importance. And it is clearly a proper, indeed, an essential, task for a law school. S. Contiuualfion and development of ser- vice to the public. Out of an effective Division of Research will come the means