"DANE LAW-SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS." (From tinted lithograph at the Harvard Law School; made after 1845, when building was enlarged at rear.) MAR 20 '918 LIBRARY THE HARVARD GRADUATES' MAGAZINE. VOL. XXVI. - DECEMBER, 1917.- No. CII. THE A HUNDRED YEARS OF THE HARVARD 1817-1917. BY FRANCIS RAWLE, '69, LL.B. '71. HE ten thousand graduates of the Law School have looked forward to its centennial anniversary this year. They wished to do honor to the school, to pay, in some sort, the tribute which they owe it. For the best of reasons, it was decided to postpone this celebration. The authorities have prepared a brief history of it for circulation among those graduates. In it there is much which will interest the general body of the alumni of the University and which they ought to know. In the days of the Fathers, when there were great lawyers, the methods of studying law were very meagre. There was nothing better than working in the offices of busy practitioners who usually devoted little time to the instruction of their students. Yet if the opportunities for study were insufficient, the system, by the personal association of preceptor and student, handed down the high traditions of the profession, and herein had an important advantage over the aggregate method of teaching law in schools. Perhaps for the better ethics of the profession we shall now have to combine both methods and require a year's work in an approved office before admission to the bar. We must bear in mind that a considerable number of that earlier generation of lawyers received their legal education in London. It is said that between 1760 and the end of the Revolutionary War, 115 Americans were admitted to the Inns of Court, of whom 47 were from South Carolina, 21 from Virginia, 16 from Maryland, 11 from Pennsylvania, 5 from New York, and one or two from each of the other Colonies. Perhaps one third as many more had been educated in England before 1760. Many of these became the great men of the country: Signers of the Declaration, Chief Justices, and Leaders of the Bar. In 1778, Isaac Royall, a citizen of Massachusetts but living in London, provided in his will for a "Professor of Laws or a Professor of Physick and Anatomy, whichever the Overseers and Corporation shall judge to be best for the benefit of said College." He died in 1781, but it was nearly 1815 before the University actually received his gift of about $7500. On August 18, 1815, the Royall Professorship of Law was established, and Isaac Parker, Chief Justice of Massachusetts, was appointed the first Royall Professor of Law. His lectures, few in number, for the endowment was small, were delivered to volunteers and not to professional students. No new department of the University was created until May 17, 1817, ⚫ when the Corporation created the Law School and elected a University Professor of Law to take charge of it. It was expressly declared to be "a new department of the University." A college dwelling-house on Harvard Square was assigned to the school — or rather, three rooms on the ground floor - one for the professor, one for the library and lectures, and a small room for the librarian. It was a day of small beginnings, but it was the first university school of law, as it is now the oldest law school in existence in any commonlaw country. But the opportunities it furnished to students were hardly greater than those of a lawyer's office. It was yet hardly a law school. A new era opened when Nathan Dane of the Massachusetts bar, the draftsman of the Ordinance for the Government of the Northwest Territory, provided a fund of ten thousand dollars as a foundation for a Professorship of American Law. He nominated and the Corporation elected Joseph Story as the first Dane Professor, in 1829. Judge Story held the office until his death in 1845. We can hardly overestimate the importance to the School, and indeed to the cause of legal learning, of the fact that Justice Story could take sufficient time from his judicial work to teach law and to write at the Law School his great commentaries on the law. On the title page of his "Equity Pleading" he is described as "One of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, and Dane Professor of Law in Harvard University." In 1833, Simon Greenleaf added another great name to the roll of professors. He filled the chair until a year after Judge Story died. In 1847 Joel Parker became Royall Professor; in 1848 Theophilus Parsons, son of the great Chief Justice, became Dane Professor; and in 1855 Emory Washburn, who had been Governor of Massachusetts, became University Professor. The School came to be known and for many years prospered as "The School of Parker, Parsons, and Washburn." These three professors were all men of great ability and were real teachers of law, according to the methods they used. But as the School passed into the sixties, it seemed to fall off in effectiveness, notwithstanding much good teaching. There was no requirement for admission except a certificate of good moral character. Degrees were conferred without any examination; they signified nothing except a residence for a certain period. Actual attendance on lectures -I can speak from knowledge of the end of that period was not demanded. It was not until 1863 that students were required to enter the school at regular times. President Eliot was elected in 1869. To him we owe the new Law School. How he came to choose Christopher Columbus Langdell as Dean must be told in his own words. It was a characteristic incident. Twenty years before, as he tells us, when he was a junior in college, he used to go often in the early evening to the room of a friend who was in the Divinity School. "I there heard a young man who was making notes to Parsons on Contracts talk about law. He was generally eating his supper at the time, standing up in front of the fire and eating with good appetite a bowl of brown bread and milk. I was a mere boy, only eighteen years old; but it was given to me to understand that I was listening to a man of genius. In the year 1870 I recalled the remarkable character of that young man's expositions, sought him in New York, and induced him to become Dane Professor. So he became Professor Langdell." Langdell was a member of a New York law firm of high standing, but was not himself well known, even at the New York bar. He was appointed Dane Professor in January, 1870, and at the organization of the School in September, was elected Dean, an office created by a new statute of the University. Never before had there been a Dean. As President Eliot said later: "The deanship was to be in his hands an instrument of reform. He was a strong man with a mind to do; his successor was another; and their terms of office, extending through critical years of legal education, fixed the office of dean of a faculty |