Page images
PDF
EPUB

of ethical value can be taught indirectly, out of the records of high and noble service in office and out of office. Such examples teach morality as well as philosophy; and herein is one important use of legal history and biography. Somers resisting the pressure of King and court to convict the seven bishops, Romilly and Brougham and Macaulay and Field in their great efforts to reform and codify the law-these are but few of the many instances whereof time would fail to tell all-of devotion to high ideals of public duty within and without the lines of professional labor. No youth fit by nature to become a public servant or to help mold public thought can fail to be fired by their contemplation.

When we come to the problem of giving instruction of an intellectual type, other than the narrowly or technically professional, which is the usual curriculum of the law school, we see at once that we have to deal with three classes of students who cannot be treated alike in this respect; the office student, the law-school pupil who has not taken the general college course, and the law-school pupil who has taken it.

Formerly, when law schools were few, and modern mechanism and methods had not ruined the law office as a place to study law, many, perhaps a majority, of students in offices were college graduates; indeed they felt that after their collegiate training it was the less necessary to undergo the class-room drill of the law school. But at present probably a large majority of the college graduates who study law do so in a law school; while most students in law offices are in remote or small country towns and their general education has not gone beyond the high school. We may therefore reduce the three classes to two: those who have had a collegiate education and those who have not.

Now no one doubts that there have been many brilliant and eminent lawyers who attained high public rank without a college education; but the argument, buttressed with the names of Lincoln and other famous men, that one may as well not go there, is a naïve non sequitur which we need not stop to confute. Certainly those who have had that advantage and who are better able to judge than those who have not, agree on its great value both for its general or cultural uses and for the broader outlook and readier facility in professional work which it gives. But we must

face facts; and one unescapable fact is that a collegiate degree cannot now, and probably cannot for many years, if it ever can, be set up in this country as the one narrow gate to the bar; for that notion is contrary to the spirit of our people.

What, then, are these additional studies, outside of the regular course of the law schools, or what we may call for brevity the extra-professional studies, that are desirable for the student to take? This is not the occasion for laying down a curriculum of such studies, and least of all should that be done by one whose chief activity in education has been the self-education of practice at the Bar. But a few suggestions may be ventured.

Foremost, perhaps, is international law. It is a historical study of deep interest as showing the growth of civilization, and the reflex action of commerce and industry, that is, of life, on law. In that light it measures the increasing control by the people, who carry on commerce and industry, of their rulers, who by their armies and navies make war and by their treaties make peace, and by both make international law. It is therefore both a humane study, in the university sense of the literae humaniores, and a humanitarian study as exhibiting the amelioration of war. It will not do to say, in view of Europe's ruined cities and the waste of waters where sank the Lusitania, that there is no such thing in time. of war as international law. Breaches of law, however many and flagrant, do not prove there is no law, until they attain the point of real anarchy. Even in the face of such horrors, the voice of law is not silent, though drowned and ineffectual in the din; and it will be the louder and more authoritative when peace

ensues.

But there is a more practical reason for knowledge of international law by the coming generation of lawyers, which has been well expressed by Senator Root. "The increase (he says) of popular control over national conduct, which marks the political development of our time, makes it constantly more important that the great body of the people in each country should have a just conception of their international rights and duties. . . . . Of course it cannot be expected that the whole body of any people will study international law; but a sufficient number can readily become sufficiently familiar with it to lead and form public opinion in every community in our country upon all important international questions as they arise."

Need I add that of this sufficient number, lawyers, who are the natural leaders of opinion on whatever touches their sphere, should form a large part? And certainly, if any studies are to be required for entrance to the Bar besides those immediately pertinent to ordinary practice, this should be one wherever it is not already pursued.

Although the thought is apart from my main theme, I may pause a moment to suggest that even to the lawyer primarily as such and not as a citizen, international law is of increasing practical importance. The ease and speed of communication and of transportation have become so great that questions of international law, private and public, and of comparative law, are constantly arising in commercial centers and those subjects for their professional value merit the attention of the ambitious student.

Mention has been already made of the value of biography as an inspiring influence; and to that should be added history and particularly legal history. For history is not only, as Freeman said, past politics; it is past art, past science, past literature, past law. And by history of law I do not mean only the development of a given doctrine or rule of law—a matter of technical learning to be extracted from the statutes and reports-I mean those general surveys of the growth of the law or of large branches of it, which put the student en rapport with the progress of civilization in its jural aspect. Such, for instance, as Reeve's History of English Law, Spence's Equitable Jurisdiction of Chancery, Holmes' Common Law, Maine's Ancient Law, Maitland's works on early English Law, the Legal Historical Series, now in course of publication, the Essays in Anglo-American Law, and some of Bryce's admirable studies in comparative law and in the constitutional history of England and the United States. One can attain only a journeyman's knowledge of the profession who does not at least seek sufficiently near to the sources to form some acquaintance with its progress from an early state. And I may add that where the case-method of study prevails, as it does so generally now, such comprehensive surveys, at least of some branches of the law, may be a useful counterbalance to the risk of failing to see the forest for the trees.

Economics, civics or the science of government, and other branches of sociology and political philosophy, the lawyer who would be prepared to take a part as citizen or officer in public affairs should know something of. Yet how often do men who succeed at the Bar display ignorance and indifference as to them, and by their crude proposals flout the lessons of experience. The rising threat of socialism, the pressing questions of social reform, the violent conflicts of labor and capital-all these and others quite as insistently demand that the young lawyer, to play his part, must have some knowledge, some guiding principles of action, with which to meet them.

Some of our law schools cover portions of the foregoing suggestions in their entrance examinations, some offer international law and some branches of legal history as required or optional topics in their third year, and more extensive studies of the same general character in post-graduate courses. And, of course, any such extra-professional studies cannot be required alike of the two classes, the college graduates and the non-graduates. For the former have already had in most colleges giving a four years' liberal-arts course some of these studies or others of similar scope and cultural value. On the other hand many office students and law-school graduates come to the Bar well equipped with knowledge of technical law but based on a very meagre general education. Both they and (sometimes) the public will suffer for that lack. To adapt such requirements, then, to the needs and prior preparation of both classes, courses in the schools could be so arranged as to attain a minimum amount of instruction for all, elective as to the collegian, required as to others. And if by reason of his previous studies the college graduate is able to pursue broader or collateral courses of reading, that will only be the just reward of his superior preparation. And as for those who enter the Bar not by way of the law school, the Bar examiners should raise their standards at least to an irreducible minimum of the subjects that we have been considering.

The present three years course of many law-schools is already well filled, not to say crowded, with strictly professional studies. Where, it will be asked, is the student to find the time to pursue any of these other studies? For several years the conviction has been gaining ground that the teaching of pleading and practice

in the school is inefficient and unsatisfactory, and that the problem must be met by confining the school studies to substantive law (at any rate not going beyond teaching there the fundamentals of adjective law) and that one year in a law office should be required before entrance to the Bar, as the means of acquiring a real knowledge of pleading and practice. This is the goal sought and in time to be attained. When reached, time enough for the other studies here advocated will be released, which is now spent and largely wasted, on the unreal study of practice.

The education of the lawyer-how important it is for himself and for his fellow citizens! His standards of conduct cannot be too high, his field of learning too broad for the work he has to do. He cannot, no one in this age can, say with Bacon, in Bacon's sense, that he takes all knowledge to be his province. But he can say that into no province of knowledge he may not need to make excursions. To the ideal lawyer, we may apply Terence's words that nothing in human nature and human affairs but is akin to him. For he embodies to us the idea of law, which is the universal order of civil society, and touches all interests. Alike in private affairs and in public life he seeks to restore that order when violated, to strengthen it when enfeebled, to adjust and rectify it amid novelties. He is a great conservative force of society, distant alike from the iconoclast and the reactionary. He is a great constructive force of society, for he builds where others destroy and brings order where they had left confusion. His education should fit him for all the varied functions of his career, and make him not only an advocate and a counselor, but a wise and instructed citizen well equipped for his duties to the commonwealth alike in private and in public life.

« PreviousContinue »