the courses offered; that they would be inclined to follow the lines of least resistance, or in other words, to take easy courses without reference to the subject, or that they would omit fundamental or important practical courses. The second objection perhaps grows out of the first, namely, that as applicants for admission to the bar examinations, and later as practicing lawyers, the men would be handicapped by reason of their ignorance of those subjects not elected. Neither of these objections has proved to be well founded. Students on the whole have shown good judgment in making their elections. They have sought the advice of members of the faculty and of lawyers, and moreover, succeeding classes have helped each other to obtain the best results in this matter. As to the second objection, it is undoubtedly true that more applicants for admission to the bar fail upon examination than formerly. This is clearly due, however, to the great and commendable advance made in most of the States during the past 15 years in requiring some proof worthy of the name of the mastery of the principles of law on the part of those seeking admission to the bar. There has been a very decided raising of the standards in this respect, though much yet remains to be done. Unquestionably, law graduates of the present day are on the average much better prepared for the practice of law than were those of 20 or 25 years ago. The increasing emphasis on training in legal thinking and legal analysis has fitted the student to study by himself those subjects which he did not take in the law school.

Nevertheless, there has been a growing feeling on the part of law teachers that the course ought if possible to be increased to four years. Ten years ago a suggestion that this might be done was greeted with disapprobation, if not with derision, by some of the best law teachers in the country. But at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, held in Chicago in December, 1914, the policy of requiring four years of law study, though only tentatively proposed, was received and discussed seriously and with much favor. There are obvious objections. The time and expense necessary for the completion of the law course in any of the better law schools to-day is already a serious burden to a poor man. There are strong economic and social reasons why the lawyer should begin to be self-supporting and to be able to maintain a family as early as possible. Moreover, it is desirable that a lawyer should begin his practice while he is still adaptable mentally and otherwise. Nevertheless, the great expansion of the body of our law, the increasing difficulty of meeting the requirements of modern business and legal conditions, and the increasingly insistent demand from the laity for a higher degree of professional efficiency are exerting a pressure for a longer law course which it may be difficult to resist. Perhaps it should be added that the increase in the volume of law is by no

means merely cumulative. While the old principles of justice may always endure, certainly the new conditions in modern society call for different applications of them. As a result, we have great fields of law which are to all intents new, and these fields must be explored by anyone who would become a thoroughly competent lawyer. It is necessary only to mention the vast growth in public law, including particularly some phases of constitutional law and the law dealing with public corporations and public utilities, to enforce the point made. Moreover, the law of torts is undergoing radical and swift changes; property law, at least in the larger cities, is becoming more and more complicated; and the vast body of statutory law can no longer be safely or properly ignored in any adequate legal education. To some extent this pressure for a longer curriculum has been met in several of the schools by offering an optional fourth year, leading to a second degree in law. This will do very little to solve the problem, however. In the first place, if the law schools grant the first degree for three years of study, and if the laws of the several States permit one to practice after only three years of study, very few students will feel inclined or able to take the fourth year. Competition decisively settles the problem for them in favor of the shorter course. Moreover, nearly all of those few who take the fourth year of law work in such schools as Harvard or Michigan do so to prepare themselves for the teaching of law or for some other special purpose. It will require compulsory action by the schools and probably by the laws of the several States relating to admission to the bar to effect general lengthening of the course. This is true despite the fact that many students themselves feel the need of a longer period of legal study and have said that they wished the law school would take the forward step and require a fourth year of work. The summer session or the summer quarter of law work now offered in several schools offers a partial solution of this problem, and not a few students are already availing themselves of this means of acquiring a more extensive and thorough legal training.

CONTENT OF THE LAW SCHOOL CURRICULUM.

Akin to the topic just treated is that of the content of the law school curriculum. In this respect, too, there has been much improvement since 1893. The report of that year criticised the law curricula of the country as too closely confined to practical private law and to the technical rather than the scientific or philosophic view of law. It is and always must remain the main business of a law school to treat thoroughly the principal branches of private law. But among the leaders in legal education at least there is a growing tendency to supplement this study with at least some view of law in

its larger and philosophic aspects. Among those who favor such a reform, some would give instruction at the outset of the course in the elements of law in the scientific sense of that term, including a study of jurisprudence and perhaps of the leading philosophies of law, and then build the superstructure in private law upon these as a foundation. A strong argument may be made for this view. In practice, however, this method has thus far been found difficult of realization, if not quite ineffective. Consequently we find the courses in legal history, legal philosophy, jurisprudence, and comparative law offered to seniors or to graduate students. A priori one might suppose that the scientific method of teaching law would be to begin with the elements of law systematically arranged and to make a study of jurisprudence as a basis for the study of any particular system of law. It may be doubted, however, whether this plan will ever succeed, at least for the English common law. It has been amply demonstrated that nothing is more difficult for the beginning student to master than the abstract, in whatever science he may be pursuing. The average student, even among well-trained men, finds it difficult to understand and retain mere abstract juristic principles. Once he has studied a particular system of law and made the myriad applications of it which the modern method of legal education requires, he is in a position to approach intelligently jurisprudence as a science and to enter into the spirit of legal philosophy.

Since the publication of the committee report of 1893 nearly all of the stronger university law schools have added to their curricula courses in administrative law, private international law, public officers, and some other associated topics. Public international law is taught in two or three law schools regularly, but is made available to law students in a large number of other law schools that are departments of universities in which this topic is treated in the college or arts department. The comment of the 1893 report was that the confining of the curriculum to merely private-law subjects tended to produce an unphilosophic, narrow, and legalistic attitude toward law. The addition since then of the courses indicated in this and the preceding paragraph has done something at least to correct this tendency. Perhaps even more in the same direction has been accomplished by increasing the emphasis throughout the curriculum upon the historical and evolutionary development of law.

TEACHING PRACTICE AND PROCEDURE.

The matter of teaching practice and procedure in law schools has been a serious problem for a number of years. The report of 1893 states that the moot court was then "one of the most common, as well as the most useful, exercises a student can practice." Never

theless, some very strong indictments have been brought against the moot court, at least in its early form. It has been vigorously argued that practice can not be successfully taught in the law school, and that therefore time given to that exercise might be much better employed in teaching substantive law, with pleading and evidence added. Despite these objections, an increasing amount of time and effort has been given to the whole subject of teaching procedure, and while there are still differences of opinion about the matter, it may fairly be said that in the more highly developed form of recent years the practice court and the practice courses have met most of the early objections and are recognized to be legitimate and very important parts of the curriculum.

In the main the objections have been based upon the supposition that the principal function of the moot or practice court was to offer a sort of advance rehearsal of the dramatic features of a law trial and that as it was impossible to reproduce the conditions under which actual cases are tried the effort must in large measure fail. No doubt there are moot courts still conducted on this plan, but in the stronger schools the practice court of to-day proposes for itself a very different function. The practice court is but the final stage in the teaching of practice. The general principles of practice are taught by means of the study of scientifically collected cases on the subject, and then the preparation of process and pleadings and the trial of cases follow much as laboratory work follows the study of theory in the sciences. The present tendency therefore is to make of the practice court not at all an imitation of or mere rehearsal for actual court work, but a stage in the educational process. While the successive steps of a trial are gone through with under conditions sufficiently accurate to make the experience valuable as an initiation into trial work, the main purpose is to show how these steps are correlated and brought together in the integral thing which we call a trial. It may well be that some schools are so circumstanced with reference to the type of work they do and the immediate occupation of most of their graduates that it is not important for them to do this work. Some variation indeed in the methods of law schools throughout the curriculum is desirable. Certainly some of the schools that have put the study and teaching of procedure upon a scientific basis are contributing to the general cause of procedural reform and are turning out students who show the value of this training.1

1 For discussions of this subject see Proceedings of the Association of American Law Schools as printed in the annual volumes of the American Bar Association reports. See especially the paper by Dean James Parker Hall, in the Amer. Bar Assoc. Proc. for 1905, the paper of Prof. Edson R. Sunderland, in the Amer. Bar Assoc. Proc. of 1913, and a paper printed in the Illinois Bar Assoc. Proc., 1914, at p. 399.

METHODS OF TEACHING.

In 1893 the American Bar Association committee gave some account of the underlying theories and the methods of the three principal methods of teaching law, namely, the lecture system, the textbook system, and the case system. The advantages and disadvantages of these were pointed out, but no decided preference was indicated for any one of them. At that time all three methods were still strongly entrenched, though the lecture system was undoubtedly losing in the contest for supremacy. To-day the case method forms the principal, if not the exclusive, method of teaching in nearly all of the stronger law schools of the country. Lectures on special subjects are of course still delivered in all law schools, and this doubtless always will be the case. But for staple instruction in the important branches of the common law the case has approved itself as the best available material for use practically everywhere. There are still some schools the catalogues of which announce that they are not wedded to any one system of instruction, but make a judicious use of all of the approved types, stressing each as the nature of the subject may require. No good school whose faculty is capable of independent thinking would nail to the mast the flag of any particular instructional method as the one to sink or swim with. As the law changes, methods of teaching it also must change. Even among followers of the so-called case method, there are wide variations among individual teachers. A truly scientifically prepared textbook will always have its place for teachers, students, and practicing lawyers, and the lecture is still necessary for some special topics. It is respectfully submitted, however, that of all ineffective, because the most incomplete, superficial, and confused of methods, the so-called "combination method" is the worst. It is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. From it the student must fail to receive the orderly, coordinated view of the subject which should be given to him by a good law school. No one view of the law is given in its entirety. In this so-called combination method the case is in reality used merely as an illustration of the principle stated abstractly in the lecture or textbook. So used the case is of course not wholly without value. But the student who has followed this method has failed almost completely to receive a view of law and a training in legal thinking to be obtained from the study of its primary statement. The report of 1893 objected to calling the case the "source of law." In one sense the objection is well founded, but at least it may be said that in Anglo-American law the case is the primary and the only authoritative statement of law. For this reason, and because the lawyer is to deal with the material in this form throughout his professional life, it is highly important that he get a first-hand, system