Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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sn 3, 1. p with its ,ii .id--inie progress, the School during the last twenty years has heroine a pleasanter ii wit.-li to li-.-- .iiitl work. The Harkness Center, with its law-tlorinitories and its tlining hall lsliown aliovel 1. .,..i ilu- ,.,,,.., tn. N ul studying law at Harvard . . Un the opposite page, one of the Harkness l'l'I'llH, important trait of any institution of learning, development in this matter is primary to all the rest. lzxer since the School began it has always had some students of the highest human and intellectual qualities. To the School of Parker, Parsons, and Washburn came Christopher C. lungdell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Chip- nian Gray. But during the years between the mid- IHIUR and IPVU, intellectual requirements for ad- mission to candidacy, for retention in the School, for the award of the LLB.. were negligible. If a student enrolled, paid the tuition fees, and at- tentletl the Sehool's exercises for eighteen months, if he avoided gross misconduct an LLB. was his for the asking. Beginning with Langdell's admin- istration in 1870 and extending to World War ll. admission to the School had remained com- paratively easy. Langdell's school began tg fe- quire a eollege degree for most admissions, but an A.B. was no great hurdle. Selection came atter. not before, admission. The class that entered in 1925 lost 372 Of its members in June. 1020. most of them by reason of academic inadequacy demonstrated in the first-year exami- nations. ln the ister mos and the'193O's the School made some effort to correct this waste by selecting for admission men with higher A.B. records, but only after the Second World War, when applications for admission became more numerous than ever before, did the School rigor- ously apply double screening, by required excel- lence in college performance, and high ranking in what amounts to a competitive admissions examination administered by an independent examining agency serving most top-ranking American university schools of law. The classes so selected have contained prac- tically no students not amply qualified to do satisfactory law-school work. Any justification for inadequacy demonstrated in annual examina- tions has now disappeared. Instead teachers of law now face a different problem. The law is growing more complex every year, and students of uniformly high qualifications are demanding instruction quite different in content and in method from that provided when Dean Ames ended his work. How can we make the best use of our excellent student material? Shortly after 1946 the School introduced a teaching-fellow pro- gram, to provide small group instruction in the first year. Every student, in his third year, must write, under faculty guidance and submit, as a

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'How a mlm P law, Win 'W cr- : and WSU. hen a Phi of Um fffical 1920 illled, ll for 2 and 1 the Owed An. law. Cd a 'Il of con- 930's PHI! work tritus Q31-. 1 the ly to ation WIS ru1fY- Q l . ...,... -.....m1u-411:11 S h l b 1995 the orginal Langdell Hall was much too small Th 't' fl9l8b ht .hftdtbkt th oog y - 1 1 e qrmlsme O mug a me O Su eng ac 0 e dc lan much larger than the original design of 19959 the to take care of the load. In 1926-1927 the building was complete on a p l ' H west wing was added and the northerly wing extended considerably farther than the architect had originally contemplated. saw a number of the members of the faculty leave the Law School temporarily or permanently to aid the Roosevelt administration and its New Deal. This tradition of governmental service by professors had begun as early as 1900, but the movement was much intensified in the later years of Roscoe Poundls deanship and has con- tinued ever since. In 1936 a brilliant young professor of legis- lation, James McCauley Landis, succeeded Pound in the deanship. Landis had been one of the most committed activists of the faculty who went to Washington to help the Roosevelt administration. On October 8, 1933 the President appointed Landis a Federal Trade Commissioner, in the following July, Roosevelt appointed him a mem- ber of the new Securities Exchange Commission, of which Landis became Chairman for two years. Meantime Harvard carried him on leave. Landis' Washington days made him a devout convert to faith in administrative discretion as the cure for governmental ills. His book The Administrative Process, published after his return to Harvard, demonstrated his intellectual brilliance and his remarkable grasp of the intricacies of national government. At the same time it showed his capacity to shut out from his mind the possibility that power is a heady thing, and that the political process can as easily produce unfortunate ad- ministrators as it can create any other sort of unfortunate public servant. But in 1936 James Landis had to his credit all the qualities needed to carry the School for- ward. His academic experience was brilliant, his writing was literate and forceful. He foresaw the increasing role of government in American life. He understood the theory and practice of adminis- tration, and he had known the Harvard Law School for fifteen years as a student and as a teaching professor. The School welcomed him as 19

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condition of earning a degree, a documented legal research paper of a character measured by the standards of a law review article. Most stu- dents write these papers in the greatly expanded ram which allows individual choice seminar prog of subject-matter, but any man who prefers can write under individual instruction of a professor. Any man? In 1950 we began admitting women! International legal studies have been part of the Schoolis interest ever since Story's day, but they began a rapid expansion immediately after World War II ended. The course-offerings in this field multiplied rapidly, qualified faculty and re- search-fellows have been attracted to the School. The International Legal Studies wing, added to Langdell in 1958, tangibly symbolizes this ex- panded concern for matters involving more na- tions than one. While all this has been going forward, domestic law has rightly continued to claim the School's primary attention. Our principal product is the American lawyer in private practice, he must be equipped with the skills required to educate him- self for the problems he will meet in the year 2000 and later-problems the present faculty can only guess at. The faculty must prepare and keep up to date teaching material which serves the developing curriculum. The library must con- tinue to collect and make accessible the explo- sively expanding literature of the law. The School's faculty and students must continue, as they now attempt to do, to keep in touch with allied dis- ciplines of scholarship by such devices as our joint faculty appointments in law and history, law and economics, law and public administra- tion, and others. Students accomplish the same end by cross-registration in other departments. Meantime the mission of the School to prepare advanced scholars in the law is recognized by the programs for the Master's degree and the Doctoral degree, in which each year nearly a hundred young men study for post-LLB. de- grees. Step by step with its academic progress, the School during the last twenty years has become a pleasanter place in which to live and work. The Harkness Center, with its law-dormitories and its dining hall, has increased the amenities of studying law at Harvard to a degree fully under- standable only by those who, in the days before l950, were unable to find a room in Hastings and finally lodged themselves in some unsavory 23