must reflect the ever-changing conditions of its social and business life. The judges on the bench, the practitioners at the bar, the legislators in the senate, all have one common aim,—to determine what is fairest, most just, and best for the general interest, taking into consideration existing facts. Public opinion, too, and business or social gains or dangers strongly influence them. There may be many of these clearly present in the community now of which there was no trace a hundred years ago, and which must mould our present law into new forms substantially different from the old theories. Such are new enterprises and new ideas which call for new adjustments. These can only be studied, explained, and settled by men whose hands are on the pulse of affairs, and who are in sympathy with and understand them.
Thus jurisprudence, while it is admittedly in some sort a science, is in its practice a science unlike any other. It has not, and from its nature cannot have, the exact divisions and classifications of other sciences. It is as wide as human action, variable as human opinion. It follows and is shaped by human necessities arising from constantly changing facts; and the question to be solved is what method of teaching law in schools will best equip young men to give good practical advice based upon the law.
Of course the teaching of law depends upon the teacher, and he must have peculiar qualifications. The life of the recluse and student is not permitted to him; he must be abreast with events. He must be among men, understanding the inner nature of their manifold enterprises, watching the working and studying the extent and the limitations of the thousand and one new, unwritten business rules which control their dealings with one another. The law must be as wide as these, as flexible as these; and the teacher must not only know what it is in the books, but if it is not yet enacted or judicially pronounced, what it is most likely to be. With all this there must be knowledge of the law of the books, for provided it works no positive injustice, courts, in discussions before them, will treat as settled principles, theories which former courts have examined into and declared to be sound. Knowledge, therefore, of the adjudications of other courts, and knowledge, too, wide, thorough, and accurate, is requisite. Running throughout any branch of jurisprudence are theories of universal application, based upon decisions found in some half-dozen or more cases in which the theory is created by course of judicial reasoning upon analogous evidentiary facts. These facts, the theories of law which resulted immediately from them, and the distinctions, qualifications, and multiform phases of the theory as established, the instructor must be familiar with.
These seem necessary qualifications in an instructor who seeks to make ready a young man for the needs of modern law practice. The charge against law schools to-day, in the mouths of business men, is that they turn out men who are good legal theorists, perhaps, but who have not much practical knowledge. Their judgment is not to be trusted. They are not of much use. The lawyer who is wanted by business men must be an adroit business agent. He must understand how to advise business men in their business, how to manipulate men and things for them, how to suggest plans for them to win, how to snatch them from disaster when it threatens.
These are things which schools that give sole attention to legal theories can never teach. In these things the office experience of the law clerk is valuable. There he can watch men, and this is often quite as profitable as studying books.
Upon a theory of combining these methods of instruction the Buffalo Law School was founded in 1887. It had been a project of long standing. Many years before, a number of prominent Buffalo lawyers, who numbered among them Millard Fillmore, afterwards President of the United States, and the Hon. Nathan K. Hall, afterwards
