Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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ld a coming need for much more teaching, ipoiifticn the fall of 1909 the faculty still had only nine professors of law. Dean Ames fell gravely ill and Austin Wakeman Scott, who had graduated the proceeding June, was called back to the School in December of that year as an instructor to take over the Dean's courses in pleading aud CQUHY- Dean Ames died in January, 1910 andgin May of that year Austin Scott became an .assistant pro- fessor. The youth of the School is exemplified h f t that in 1966 Dane Professor Emeritus b Szotttestiiiz comes daily to his .office in Laggdil and is working hard at new editions of his oo s on trusts and on the American Law Institute Reslatement of the Conflict of Laws. For a brief time, from 1910 to 1915, Ezra d h' . He was an Ripley Thayer held the eans ip eminent alumnus of the School, a scholarly and charming member of the Boston Bar. Following Dean Thayer's untimely death in 1915 Professor Roscoe Pound became Dean in his place. Pound served as Dean from 1916 to 1936, and in 1964 died as a University Professor emeritus. Poundis deanship began just before World War I reduced the School's student population to a handful of men all unfitted for field service. A large number of the professors left for government service of one sort or another. The armistice of 1918 brought a rush of students back to the Schoolg by 1925 the original Langdell Hall was much too small to take care of the load. In 1926-1927 the building was completed on a plan much larger than the original design of 1905, the west wing was added and the northerly wing extended con- siderably farther than the architect had originally contemplated. The School continued to grow- by 1930 it had almost as many students as it now has, though the faculty was only half as large, Dean Pound's administration reflected a num- ber of significant movements in American law, His main theoretical commitment was to uS0Ci0- logical jurisprudence -the idea that the law ex- isted to serve the best interests of society and that man should mold it to serve those interests. Today few people remember the day when a number of otherwise sensible lawyers thought of law as a brooding omnipresence which tran- scended man's poor powers, and-indeed practical legislators had for many generations before 1920 been giving their constituents what they wanted, without realizing that such legislation called for any theoretical justification. Pound's Scope and Purpose of Sociological Jurisprudence in the Harvard Law Review of 1911 and 1912 showed that theory was catching up with practice. An- other effort occurred in the field of penal law. During the 1920's the United States sensed a deep dissatisfaction with the administration of criminal justice. The Law School became con- spicuously active in this field, in the early 1930's it established a Criminal Law Institute as part of the School. The Institute discontinued its work after a brief time, but today's Professor Emeritus Sheldon Glueck, and his wife Eleanor, have car- ried forward from that day to the present the Institute's concept of criminal law as a study to which scientific methods can be applied. The last days of Dean Pound's administration Lunizdcll Hall-Built about 1906 the right wing contemplated by the original ' ' ' j I . . . 1 A Q j plan had not been bu lt when this picture was 1-lk' 11- T111 111111111112 C0111111110d the bulk of the library with adjoining reading rooms, lecture rooms, and the offices of the faculty. .-- 4...--I ,,. ...J , The lu tale West vs saw 1 the l aid Deal prol mov 1611 llllll l lati ini C01 W 01 lt it lt 18

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only on examination, a practice which had been abandoned some time in the 182O's, the faculty ignored this requirement and the Corporation nevertheless continued to grant law degrees to any man who stayed in residence for eighteen months. Gradually the Law School began to evoke strong criticism. In 1868 Professor Parker resigned, Professor Parsons followed the next year. In 1869 the University elected a new Presi- dent, Charles W. Eliot, a scientist and man of great vision. He had an opportunity to rebuild the Law School and for this work in 1870 he chose a forty-three year old scholarly New York practitioner named Christopher Columbus Lang- dell with whom he had been acquainted when Eliot was an undergraduate and Langdell was a law student. Langdell became Dane Professor in January, 1870, and the following fall he was elected the first Dean of the Law School. Langdell had been much impressed by the in- creasing preoccupation of intellectual Americans . 15

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of Langdell south of the present west wing was completed and occupied. E more significant for the long run was n the vcehange which came in underlying faculty attitudes around the turn of the century. The United States was moving from a law primarily decisional to a law of statutes. Dean Ames, a wise, learned and good man, then the worldls most distinguished university scholar in the field of negotiable obligations, wrote an article in the Harvard Law Review for 1900, which carried un- intended overtones of the non-involvement of academic jurists in practical legislation. The Ne- gotiable Instruments Law had been drafted, ap- proved by the Commissioners on Uniform Laws and adopted in four States, Dean Ames told his readers, before he saw it! At that late day the Dean suggested how he thought it should have been drafted in the first place. But the function of professors of law, including the faculty of the Harvard Law School, to aid in shaping the new statutory law was rapidly developing. This func- tion came to the fore with Samuel Williston's activities in drafting other uniform statutes con- cerning commercial law. Dean Ames himself took up the Work as a Uniform Law Commissioner for Massachusetts. The School's continuing increase in students ,,l...a......'..w-nf-1 1 l 1 i i 17