Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/49

PRACTICE OF LAW IN NEW YORK CITY. 2S PRACTICE OF LAW IN NEW YORK CITY. nPHE orator at the Langdell celebration in June last was a foreign lawyer. At once he claimed kin with his distin- guished audience by reminding them of the wide sway which our common law holds over this earth, and how that law — despite merely local divergences — is to-day a leading unifying factor in the civilization of mankind. Certainly it is not amiss that a learned profession, at one time distinctively recognized as The Faculty, should thus contemplate its history and also its ultimate goal; and that every earnest, trained member of it should at the close of each day's work, however humdrum, resort to the con- solation that even he may to some degree be helping our law to become in form a perfect logic and in substance truth. It is necessary that a university should teach law thus, as a science, but the students who learn of it only in this academic mode may go to the bar over-persuaded that this sublimation has been definitely reached. It has not. In New York City law schools are now the highway to the bar. Mere empirics, who used to come into — indeed constitute — the profession by " reading " in the office of some practitioner, are rarely found. There are at the bar, and probably always will be, men of native aptitude, who, beginning as office boys or as stenographers with large law firms, absorb an inarticulate knowledge of law and of the rules for applying it, and so come into marked success. Such men are not numerous, and certainly are not to be blamed if they be more credit to themselves than to the profession. The diffusion of wealth enables more men than ever to seek their professional degrees at highly endowed institutions, which can well afford to award diplomas only to such as meet a high standard of knowledge — largely self-won — by the scientific (historical) method. The interest of those already in the profession is to keep down the number of fresh competitors by keeping up the standard of admission to practice. For twenty years our local bench has narrowly watched the law schools, and the tendency of authority here has been steadily to force a higher standard on those schools