Law School: American legal education from the 1850s to the 1980s

Author: (American) Steven Stearns, translated by Yan Yalin, Li Xincheng, and Fu Xin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-09-01
Features: [Excerpt:] Faced with these objections, the preparations for the law school continued, with Joseph Beale, who had planned to support Harvard, appointed as the Dean of the University of Chicago Law School. Meanwhile, Ernest Freund, a member of the University of Chicago's Board of Trustees and a political scientist, drafted a notice for the newly established law school, claiming that its responsibility lay in "promoting and encouraging systematic research in comparative jurisprudence, legal history, and legislative principles." Unexpectedly, in addition to the courses planned to be offered as in Harvard Law School, international law courses would also be included. Moreover, the notice suggested electing new courses such as taxation, constitutional law, jurisprudence, and Roman law in the second year. When Beale heard these suggestions, he was alarmed and firmly stated, "We do not offer these courses." Dean Ames said, "Here, we unanimously oppose teaching anything other than law. We believe that only lawyers can be teachers at the law school." Beale furiously declared, "In such a law school, I might be completely useless." However, he still went to the University of Chicago Law School. The results of the experiment were very satisfactory, proving to be closer to the practices of Harvard Law School than Beale had feared or some Chicago faculty had hoped. [47] In fact, a gap still existed between theory and reality in many law schools. This was because universities agreed that law schools could design their own curricula or professional training. They saw themselves as academic centers. For example, in the 1890s, President Welles of Columbia University liked to call the Columbia Law School the "School of Comparative Jurisprudence." [48] In reality, it was merely a night school that successfully helped government employees pass the bar exam. [49] In the 1890s, Georgetown College's only program—a night school—had nearly 1,000 part-time students, but it still pretended to be interested only in "non-law" courses such as legal ethics, legal philosophy, and legal history. [50] Among the three renowned schools in Washington, most important is Georgetown University. The law school was respected within the social sciences college and, as part of its academic status, it could award students more than three doctoral degrees in common law and civil law. However, the law school still had to constantly find faculty members. Three teachers retired before the new semester in 1899, and the Dean of the law school informed the university president: "It is very difficult to find the teachers you desire for the university law school. With the meager salaries we can pay, we don't know how we can find the teachers needed for the job each year." [51]