Court of Cook County about twenty years, and edited for some time the "Law Register." He is a master of several languages, possesses literary ability of a high order, and has written an enduring work, now in its fourth edition, entitled "The Constitutional Convention: Its History, Powers, and Modes of Proceeding."
From 1876 to 1879 this school had for one of its instructors James L. High, the author of the works on Receivers, Injunctions, Extraordinary Legal Remedies, all in their second edition, and the editor of the Speeches of Erskine in four volumes. He possesses the very highest elements of character. He has a finished style of English composition, and as a practitioner, as well as an author, he stands in the front rank of his profession.
Hon. Lyman Trumbull, LL.D., taught in this school from 1873 to 1876. All know his career as a member of the Legislature, Secretary of State, and Judge of the Supreme Court of Illinois, and afterwards as a member of the House of Representatives, a United States Senator for eighteen years, and a great constitutional lawyer.
During the years 1873 to 1876 Hon. James R. Doolittle, LL.D, was an instructor. He was graduated with first honors at Geneva College in 1835, won a reputation for judicial ability in Wisconsin before 1857, thereafter represented that State in the United States Senate with distinction for twelve years, since which time he has been a noted constitutional lawyer.
The names of the others who have instructed in this school are Judges John M. Wilson and Grant Goodrich, James B. Bradwell and Gen. R. Biddle Roberts, and John Alexander Hunter and Philip A. Myers.
During the whole history of the Union College of Law, its students have from time to time been favored with the learning and eloquence of the Chicago Bar, in lectures by Emory Storrs, Leonard Swett, the present Chief-Justice (Melville W. Fuller), and many others.
The law schools of this country, during their century of existence, have won for themselves precedence, as a means of legal education. This, though previously settled in fact, was in 1879 finally, formally, permanently determined by the recorded authorized voice of the American bar,—the American Bar Association, speaking through its Committee on Legal Education. Other questions, however, now confront law schools, which are being discussed with zeal: How is instruction to be imparted? Shall it be by lecture or by recitation? Shall the students be taught from the basis of text-books or decided cases? These are questions which will certainly be settled by the second centennial of law schools in this country, and the writer thinks before then. By lecture or by recitation? Has it or has it not been pretty well settled by the course of instruction in schools other than professional, that it is well for a student to learn from text and by recitation the terminology and elementary principles of a science before attempting to learn from lectures? Does or does not the experience of every man who has completed a collegiate and professional course teach him that such is the proper mode of instruction? Leading cases or text-books? What is to be taught? The law, undoubtedly. Where is it to be found? What are its sources and evidences? While decided cases are the chief sources and evidences of the Common Law, they are by no means exclusively so. No one thing is more fully interwoven among or established by the decided cases, ancient and modern, than that text-books are both sources and evidences of the Common Law. (Ram's Legal Judgment, Townshend's ed., pp. 150-173.) The authority of text-writers has actually overturned that of decided cases. (Ibid. p. 169.) The Common Law having been thus established, we cannot afford to disregard any of its declared sources of authority. To the extent we do so, we become one-sided. While decided cases clearly have precedence as authority,
