Educating Lawyers for the Science of the Law

The establishment of higher standards of legal education hastened the development of professionalism. Through the first half of the nineteenth century legal education had been casual, providing training to would-be lawyers through the apprenticeship system. A few law schools had existed before the Civil War, but there was little uniformity in either the method or the substance of the teaching of law. Some judges and lawyers, like Tapping Reeve (founder of the famous Litchfield Law School in Connecticut), operated private schools, and a few colleges created law departments. By about 1850, however, the emphasis in legal training shifted decisively away from the office and apprentice system and toward professional education. Between then and 1900 the number of law schools increased from 15 to 101, with an enrollment of over ten thousand. The University of Michigan Law School, which was the largest in the nation, alone had 883 students in 1900. By 1920 the student population in law schools had almost doubled again. By 1895 twenty-four states required from one to four years of study (or a college degree) before a candidate could take the bar examination, and this number grew steadily thereafter.

These institutions of legal education displayed considerable variety. Night law schools, for example, flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Iowa Law School, in Des Moines, granted twelve degrees to its class of all night

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students in 1866. By 1900 there were twenty night law schools and five other institutions that mixed day and night training. These night schools were particularly important in training practitioners; they gave their students a practical education in the law that equipped them to practice in their ethnic communities. Immigrants found these schools particularly attractive, and much of the ethnic bar of major cities, as well as local political and judicial figures, were recruited from them.

Blacks also had separate institutions, although in the South the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson ( 1896) invariably produced inferior facilities and faculties. The most important institution of black legal education was the Howard University Law School, which opened its doors after the Civil War. Its influential and forceful dean, John Mercer Langston, the son of a white plantation owner and a slave woman, trained a small corps of black lawyers, many of whom went on to spearhead the fight for black civil rights in the first third of the twentieth century. Langston became the first head of the law department at Howard, where he developed a curriculum that relied on the lecture method with moot court practice to teach black students both the law and confidence in themselves. Despite discrimination and a continuing lack of professional opportunities, black lawyers had made "slow but steady progress, for which Langston and his Howard-trained disciples deserved much credit." ²⁰

The growth of legal education generated demands by legal educators in the ABA for a separate association to serve law schools. The ABA had established a section on legal education, but legal academics finally pressured the ABA in 1899 to issue a call for the establishment of an organization of "reputable" law schools. ²¹ The American Association of Law Schools (AALS), composed of twenty-five charter members, was open to schools and not individuals, and to gain admission institutions had to meet certain minimum standards. The AALS became a watchdog of legal education, invoking its private accreditation powers to push law schools, and the state legislatures that controlled the bar admissions process, to adopt a more professional view of legal education. The AALS made the increasing number of night law schools a special object of attack. But through the first quarter of the twentieth century, it had mixed success. It represented a steadily smaller proportion of the law school population, partly because its standards were unrealistically high and partly because its membership was so small that it could not bring effective pressure on legislatures.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 872