ions are eagerly sought for. They simplify these complicated subjects, which not very many practising lawyers understand, so that they are clear and easily comprehended. So far as the students are concerned, they are, to employ a piece of college slang, coaches of the first order. Experience enables them to know just what facts a practitioner need keep in mind to have his knowledge always available and at his fingers' ends. Dissevering what law is necessary for a man working in the nineteenth century to use, from the curious but useless and cumbersome law of the past, they teach only that. Judge Stern especially realizes that law for lawyers means money and bread, and his lectures are clear, succinct, practical expositions.
This may be said also of the lectures of Judge Wardwell on the Law of Torts, which are given weekly to the Junior class throughout the year. Judge Wardwell, before he went on the bench, was a lawyer of wide experience in cases involving questions of negligence, and since then he has been kept fresh by frequent trials of causes of the same character before him. He has, however, a characteristic which marks him, as a teacher, even more than his legal acquirements. Though he graduated from Harvard College and the Dane Law School many years ago, he retains as vividly as if it were yesterday his sympathy with young men. He understands how to infuse them with his own enthusiasm, how to incite them to work, how to make their studies one with their daily thoughts.
Something of this Judge Tourgee has, though, because of his non-residence in Buffalo, he is not so constantly among the students. Looked at from one point of view, the chair of Legal Ethics which he fills, is of importance. It may be said of law, as of no other profession, except possibly that of arms, that its practice is a match of wits. The conduct of cases is a counsel's campaign, and their trials are his battles. In these, as in grand tactics, very little things sometimes turn the scale of victory. A misunderstanding, a careless word, a missing paper, an omission of something, at the time deemed not worth noticing, often wins or loses a struggle to which weeks of thought and preparation have been given, and in which fortunes are staked. The lawyer who tries for points is the winning lawyer; and in the gaining of points there is wide room for the play of strategy. It cannot be said, however, in law, as in war, that "all is fair." On the other hand, the rules of decent practice require that one must be fair to gain; and deception, trickery, and knavery, so often separated by but a tenuous line from strategy, must be sternly ruled out. In the interests of decent practice, legal ethics lay down rules discriminating between knavery on the one hand and strategy on the other.
This is the subject on which Judge Tourgee lectures. Any one familiar with the fire of his writings, so well known to the world of letters, can easily conceive the electric energy which pervades his lectures. The dash and the nervous strength of his books appear in the literary knack which clothes with fresh life the dry rules of legal conduct which he lays down. The students and the public, who come to hear, listen with an attention rarely given to lectures, upon this subject in other law schools. He tells so forcibly what is fair or foul, manly or ignoble, just or unjust, and the duty which a lawyer owes to his brethren and to his client.
While the Buffalo Judiciary are thus taking active part in the management and instruction of the school, the Buffalo Bar are not behind them. Her leaders and busiest practitioners are on her executive board. As instances of this may be mentioned among her teachers Spencer Clinton, George Clinton, Adelbert Moot, and James Frazer Gluck. The Clintons inherit their legal ability from families of lawyers. Their father was an illustrious judge, whose father bequeathed to the State of New York its greatness in the Erie Canal, and whose
