conditions that have occurred during the past 25 years, and especially to give consideration to Dr. Hammond's plea for a more systematic legal education, by which he meant a curriculum that should scientifically reduce the body of law to its elements, to be followed by an instruction elementary and systematic in the sense thus indicated. After a discussion of these subjects an attempt will be made to consider some of the problems which seem to require early solution.

IMPROVEMENT IN LAW SCHOOLS.

At the outset it may be remarked that very great progress has been made in almost every phase of legal education. It must be admitted, however, that there was sore need of such progress, and that the greater part of it has occurred, roughly speaking, during the second half of the period indicated. In 1893 there were few law schools in the United States giving a really scientific legal education. Furthermore, an approximate estimate indicates that at that time at least half of the men going to the American bar were not attendants at any law school, but were deriving their legal education from private. study or from study in offices. Poor as American law schools then were, they nevertheless gave to their students a much more orderly, scientific, and intelligent view of the law than it is possible for ordinary men to derive from unsystematic and practically unregulated reading in private or in law offices. Unquestionably the fact that so large a portion of the American bar then and before then had been trained in this unsatisfactory way accounts for many of the defects in the practice and administration of law which have been the objects of such widespread and violent criticism during the last few years. During the period covered in the present report there has been a rapidly growing tendency for the prospective lawyer to seek a law school for his legal education, and fortunately there has been concurrently an equally marked improvement in American law schools. In these two tendencies lies the greatest hope for a better, simpler, and more systematized body of law, and for a more direct, speedy, and just administration of the law in the future.

Taking up the three points of the 1893 report in order, it is to be noted first that at that date no law school in the country required that the applicant for admission to its course should have completed any college work. The first complete step in this direction was taken by the Harvard Law School in 1899, when it put into force a requirement of the completion of a college course. As a matter of fact, the majority of Harvard law students for a number of years had been college graduates, but the formal announcement of this requirement gave a distinct impulse to the advance in prelegal requirements in law schools throughout the country. The better

law schools then required only a high-school education before the beginning of law study, and not all even of these better schools were enforcing this requirement in letter and spirit. A common practice was to admit students subject to the condition of completing the high-school course after admission. This practice of placing an extra heavy burden upon the students whose equipment was below par was absurd, illogical, and most unfortunate in its results.

Though much still remains to be done, the advance in this respect is marked and gratifying. Harvard still requires the completion of the college course as prerequisite to admission to the law school. Pennsylvania has announced the enforcement of this requirement beginning with the year 1915-16. Columbia, Chicago, Stanford, Western Reserve, and California require the completion of the college course or of three years of such course upon a combined college-law curriculum. Cornell, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, the University of the Philippines, and some others require the completion of two years of college work for admission. A number of other institutions require one year of college work. North Dakota has announced the requirement of two years beginning in the fall of 1917, and many other law schools are contemplating similar requirements. It thus appears that all or nearly all of the university law schools of the country are now, or within two years will be, requiring at least two years of college work. Undoubtedly the effect of this requirement will be to lead many students who enter college with the purpose of taking only the minimum amount, i. e., two years, to go on to the completion of three or four years of work.

These facts are of course most gratifying. They are accompanied, however, by a situation which is full of menace for the future and which, it is submitted, it is the duty of the American and of State bar associations to grapple with earnestly, intelligently, and courageously. That danger lies in the fact that a large number of law schools are private and proprietary, avowedly or actually. Many of these schools are night schools. By this it is not intended to say that all night schools are bad; but obviously, under ordinary conditions at least, a school conducted upon the night basis, whose students and faculty are engaged in other work during the larger portion of their working hours, can not hope to and in fact does not do as much work or as good work as the better day schools are accomplishing. Many of these proprietary schools are owned and managed by conscientious and intelligent men, but it is quite obvious. that, as these schools must be run for profit and could not continue to be operated at a loss, their proprietors must consider the extent of their patronage. This inevitably means the maintenance of low

standards of admission and low standards of work in the school in the majority of cases. The larger interests of the State, the profession, and the requirements of justice can not and certainly are not taken into consideration to anything like the extent to which they are considered in the law schools actually maintained by the stronger universities of the country. This situation has prevented the raising of admission standards in schools of this type. The inevitable consequence will be that the student who cares little for general education, for culture, and for breadth of view, but who aims only at getting to the bar for money-making purposes in the shortest possible time and at the least possible expenditure of effort and money will attend the school with low standards and low requirements. Unless this tendency is checked, much of the good that the better university schools are attempting to accomplish, at the expense of loss in students and money to themselves, will be offset by the schools run mainly for revenue only. This is no idle speculation, but a real condition, which must be grappled with vigorously and promptly. The greater number of these proprietary schools profess to require the completion of a high-school course as prerequisite to admission to law study. In reality the requirement is not enforced in most of these schools. In many of them, students who have had only a partial high-school course or none at all are admitted, subject to "conditions." These "conditions" are removed by taking examinations from time to time on the basis of study pursued in private, and sometimes in coaching schools maintained by the law school for this purpose.

LAW SCHOOLS VERSUS LAW OFFICES IN LEGAL TRAINING.

In 1892 the committee on legal education of the American Bar Association reported that it had no means of ascertaining the number of students who were pursuing their studies in offices, nor the courses of study pursued by them. The 1911 report of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching contained an estimate that perhaps one-third of the men then going to the bar had studied in private or in law offices. This was probably somewhat of an overestimate; certainly the proportion of such students is smaller now. In nearly all of the entire tier of Northern States, and in the middle group extending from ocean to ocean, comparatively few students are now thus preparing for the bar. In the State of Michigan, for example, less than 5 per cent of those admitted to the bar during the past five years have been without training in law schools. In some of the Southern States the practice of preparing by office study still persists, but with the notable increase in good law schools in the South during the last few years a speedy decline may be expected.

in the number of office-trained applicants for admission to the bar. This marked change in tendency is cause for unqualified gratification. Even at its best, in the old days this method of preparation for the bar was decidedly bad. Unquestionably, the training thus obtained tended to make the lawyer dogmatic, legalistic, and formalistic. He perhaps became an expert dialectician and knew a great deal of law. But, generally speaking, he knew it in an unscientific way, he had little conception of its historical and evolutionary character, and he stood like adamant against the changes desired by society in general and made necessary by the continuous process of change in business, industry, and the general life of the community. With the development of the modern law office, the conditions under which office study was conducted became much worse. With the tendency to division of labor that has invaded even the professions, with modern mechanical methods of efficiency, with the intensity and pressure of modern law practice, the lawyer has had little time to give to advising, examining, and otherwise aiding the student in his office. For these and many other reasons it is to be hoped that the States will soon require study in reputable law schools as prerequisite to admission to the bar. In medicine, either as a requirement of law or as a matter of well-settled practice, every State in the Union now requires that the applicant for a license to practice medicine must be a graduate of an accepted medical school. There is absolutely no sound reason for this requirement that does not apply equally or in greater measure to the method of preparation for admission to the bar.

REQUIREMENTS FOR GRADUATION.

Within the law schools advances have been as gratifying as has been the increase in entrance requirements. Of the 58 law schools concerning which statistics were given in the report for 1892, only 9 offered a three years' course of instruction, and there is good reason to believe that not all of these 9 schools were rigorously requiring three years of study for graduation. At that time at least 5 schools were conferring degrees at the end of one year of study, and about 35 schools gave only two years of instruction. In the report of 1893 it was said:

In considering the subject of a course of study in American law schools the committee are embarrassed by the fact that a longer course than two years is impracticable for the greater number of schools. The competition of life is growing stronger all the time, and is urging young men into active, breadwinning occupations early in life. The youth of America, as a rule, wish to be independent. The sentiment of the profession and the public will not sustain, at least in some parts of the country, a longer course than two years, and even this is impracticable in some places.

And yet it will take a student at least two years under present methods to acquire a competent knowledge of the subjects of private law referred to, to fit him for practice. There is little time he can devote to public law, the history and theory of the law, and

the science of government, unless our methods of instruction are so improved as to save the time now given to the mere memorizing of practical rules and points of law, of no real service to the beginner, and to employ it on these topics, indispensable in a true system of legal education.

The committee then added:

Yet, recognizing the fact that a course of more than two years is impracticable for most, the committee recommend:

1. That for those to whom a longer course of study is possible, provision be made in the schools for postgraduate courses, where the subjects of general jurisprudence and public law shall be taught.

2. A system of electives, now found necessary in almost every branch of education by reason of the extent of human learning, and already existing in several of the schools, in which shall be required in addition to the usual course in private law already described, to pursue at least a certain number of subjects in public law, international law, the history and theory of the law, comparative jurisprudence, and the science of government.

3. Better preliminary training, if practicable. A large proportion of the schools require no entrance examination, and in none of them is the entrance examination equivalent to that for the A. B. degree in any reputable college in the country.

Much progress has been made since then. The Bureau of Education gives statistical data for the year 1913-14 for 122 law schools. Of these only one reports a curriculum of but one year, 17 have curricula of two years, and the remaining schools require at least three years for graduation. Several of the stronger schools, including Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Chicago, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Stanford, and California, are offering courses that would require from four to six years to complete at the normal rate. In the University of Michigan, for example, including a group of studies which might be regarded perhaps as extralegal, such as the history of English law, a course in the continental legal philosophies, Roman law, public international law, the theory of practice and legislation, a full six years would be required for the completion of all of the work offered. This has meant, of course, a wide development of the elective system recommended in the report of 1893. In the schools in which the elective system has been developed, it has been the policy to require the taking of at least some of the subjects which may be regarded as fundamental, such as contracts, torts, property, and pleading. Nominally, there is considerable variation in the different schools in which the elective principle is recognized as to the extent to which that principle is followed. In practice the conditions do not differ materially.

When the elective plan in law schools was still young, it was feared by some that it would produce a fragmentary and partial legal training for many students. The objections offered were of two principal kinds: First, that the students would not make wise choice among

1 Among these are 11 evening schools requiring four years.