siderably benefited by the opportunity thus afforded of learning how the successful schools of the country are conducted.
It already sufficiently appears that the question whether training in schools or in offices is the more likely to produce the best lawyers, has been settled in favor of the method of giving regular instruction in classes.
This, however, by no means determines the question that the training which many of our most eminent lawyers received in offices was not in the highest degree excellent. It must of course be conceded that very many of our ablest jurists, who never sat in the law lecture-room, were most admirably fitted for their work by that combination of practice and theory which they found in the law offices where they studied. It must also be conceded that their cases are exceptional in this, that they either had peculiar advantages in being associated with painstaking lawyers, who gave much time to the direction of their reading, with frequent quizzes, and opportunities of seeing actual practice, or else that, as students, they were able to overcome the disadvantages of desultory office-reading by sheer force of their natural abilities. Wherever the student was able to study the principles of law carefully and intelligently, and at the same time could see these principles practically applied, there was a possibility of producing a good lawyer.
But the chances for such advantages were rare, and in the hurried and busy city offices of to-day they have nearly ceased to exist. These advantages could be perfectly obtained only in institutions where instruction, both theoretical and practical, could be given by men who make such instruction their chief work and not an occasional incident of their professional lives, and therefore the law school superseded the law office as the best form of legal education.
As the best possible school for the training of a lawyer is to be intimately associated with one learned in the law, who will daily impart that learning to the student and enforce it by frequent practical illustrations, so that law school will be the best which combines just these elements of theory and practice, taught by men whose theories of law are based upon their practical experience of the law as it is administered.
A possible danger, incident to law-school training, is that of making the study of the history and development of law unduly prominent, at the expense of time which should be devoted to imparting a knowledge of the law as it is and how to practise it.
Most young men adopt the profession of law as a means of gaining a living, just as others become merchants or engineers. They cannot, at the age when they usually begin their legal studies, give more than three or four years to the preliminary work of fitting themselves for practice. At the end of that time they wish to be qualified for the actual transaction of such legal business as may be intrusted to them.
The student whose time is chiefly given to the study of the history of law, to the origin of legal procedure, and to the development of theories of law, may be well equipped for writing law treatises, but in the limited time which he can give to study preliminary to the practice of his profession, he will fail of attaining that particular knowledge of law procedure which is essential to its successful practice.
To what extent the law of the past should be studied so as not to infringe too much upon the study of the law of the present is a somewhat serious problem. The systematic study of any science, beginning with its first manifestations, following its gradual development down to its latest results, is doubtless the most orderly method of proceeding. In the beginning it is, of course, important to have some knowledge of the laws under which our fathers lived and which are in many cases the sources of the laws under which we live to day. But practical law is much more than this. From its very nature the law of a country reflects and
