THE LAW SCHOOLS AND THE COURTS

judgments will shine with new splendor and win increased respect and confidence from the public when formed not only after argument from the bar but in the new light of jurisprudence that will radiate from the law schools. Whether the law schools shall enjoy all the influence of which they are capable, will depend very much upon the policy which they pursue. In the first place, they must adhere to the doctrine that law is a science. It would be well, also, if the teaching of law should be established and recognized as an independent calling, dis tinct from that of a lawyer or a judge. Such seems to have been the ideal of Pro fessor Langdell. At the festival in honor of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Harvard College he said: "I wish to emphasize the fact that a teacher of law should be a person who accompanies his pupils on a road which is new to them, but with which he is well acquainted from having often traveled it before. What qualifies a person, therefore, to teach law is not experience in the work of a law yer's office, not experience in dealing with men, not experience in the trial or argument of causes,— not experience, in short, in using law, but experience in learning law; not the experience of the Roman advocate or of the Roman praetor, still less of the Roman procurator, but the experience of the Roman jurisconsult."1 It is not necessary and probably never will be the fact that all teachers of law shall be of the description here suggested, but Professor Langdell's conception seems to me to be fundamentally sound. The influence of a body of men looking upon the law and teaching the law as a science in the different law schools will be felt far and wide, and will be useful to the courts, the legislatures, and the public. A curious question arises as to the effect which the publication of text-books by 1 Report of Harvard Law School Association, p. 50, 1887.

professors will be likely to have upon the attendance of students at their lectures. One cannot imagine that students would care to attend lectures by Blackstone very long after he had completed the publication of his Commentaries. Judge Baldwin says that the Litchfield Law School began to decline quite rapidly from 1826, which was the year of the publication of the first volume of Kent's Commentaries. He says: "The publication of Swift's Digest and Kent's Commentaries made its whole theory of instruction antiquated."1 Under a sys tem of instruction by lectures the professors who publish their lectures would naturally lose the attendance of their students, unless they constantly revised their lectures or made new ones. Under the case system Professor Langdell published a treatise on Contracts and a treatise on Equity Plead ing, each as a companion to a collection of cases, without diminishing the interest of his students in the exercises of the class room. If anything, his treatises gave new zest to the study of the cases, to see if the professor's reading of them gave their true meaning and effect. To sum up all that I have said, with the rise of the law schools a new and I believe a glorious era is opening before the common law in the United States. That vast system of law, founded on English common law and equity, may be described as an inheritance and a trust. Without arrogat ing anything to themselves, but simply acknowledging the responsibilities of their respective positions, the judges, lawyers, and teachers of law of the United States may look upon themselves as the trustees of that great trust. The beneficiaries are the people of the entire country. By mutual co-operation in the effort to realize a great ideal, and in that way only, the inheritance will be preserved and increased and transmitted. The ideal which I pro pose is, a uniform system of American law, 1 2 Great American Lawyers, 486