Postmaster-General and a Judge of the United States Court, had attempted it and found it impracticable. But in 1887 the auspices seemed more favorable. The strong prejudices against education in law schools were dying out, and on the contrary a feeling in favor of them was steadily growing. The idea that to fit properly a young man to belong to this learned profession, he must have instruction from competent men, was beginning to prevail. There was, in short, a public demand for an institution of this kind, and Buffalo seemed a fit place for it.
The city had grown into a metropolis of two hundred and fifty thousand people. The splendid lecture rooms of the Buffalo Library building gave shelter to the school until it should have a home of its own. Near at hand was the Law Library of the Eighth Judicial Department of the State of New York, comprising between eight and ten thousand volumes of Treatises and Reports, open to the students and affording them ample facilities for reference. Special terms of the Supreme Court and of the Superior Court of Buffalo were held daily, at which judges sat to hear and determine questions touching almost every branch of the law. Close by the school, four courts of general jurisdiction were constantly in session, where important cases were being tried by distinguished counsel from all parts of the country, drawn there by the heavy railroad and commercial litigations developed by the immense railroad, commercial, and manufacturing interests centring in this queen city of the great lakes. Thus the student in the school had under his eyes the lessons of that larger school the law court, and was drilled not only in the lecture-room but also in the forum itself. The advantage of this cannot be over-estimated. There is no place where law is learned so quickly and thoroughly as among the lawyers. No teaching is so effective as the object lessons of the trial of cases in court. There have been court stenographers who have probably never opened a law book and yet who are competent lawyers. The reason of this is that they absorbed law, as it were,—acquired it, in other words, by sheer force of daily presence at trial terms, listening to legal arguments. This is a fact which all practising lawyers understand. The founders of the school appreciated it. They located their institution under the shadow of the courts, and sent their pupils into them to learn law, as they themselves were learning it, by daily practice.
The alliance between the courts and the bar on the one hand and the school on the other, was the closer because the school instructors were chosen from the four hundred members of the judiciary and bar of Buffalo. The Law School was in fact the enterprise of the Buffalo Bar, in the interest of the more thorough and effective training of its own future members. Five judges, who were holding courts almost daily, became members of its faculty or of its lecture corps. Attorneys who had won reputation as specialists in various branches gladly gave their time and their services to it. The members of the bar who were not actively engaged in the law school offered places in their offices and the benefit of an older lawyer's supervision of study, to every student in the school who would come.
With these facilities the organization of the school was perfected. It was not able to start with a large sinking fund. There were no endowed professorships. The services and time of the gentlemen who engaged in it were given without compensation to them. Their aim was to fill a want in legal education by having practical lawyers give instruction in law. They sought to teach in such a way that advantage might be derived by the student from the theories of law in all fulness, without losing on the other hand the advantage which experience has clearly shown to be derived from an office training;—that thus, as medical students learn in hospitals and as apprentices in trades, so the law student of this school might readily appreciate not only what legal theories were,
