The Columbia Law School of To-day. It is the law school, the school of political science and the school of philosophy as well as the library of the university. The law school occupies the north wing of the library building. This wing is a building, one hundred and twenty feet in length by forty-six feet wide and four stories in height. The basement is given up to the uses of the students for club-rooms, smoking-room, etc., and to the use of the law library as a stackroom. On the main or library floor is the large and well-lighted reading-room (37x62 feet), conveniently furnished with reading and writing tables and chairs. The walls are lined with the books most in demand, to which the students have free access, while trained attendants and a book-lift bring the contents of the book-stack within easy reach. The stack-room itself is furnished with tables and chairs for the use of the professors and others pursuing special work. On one side of the reading-room is the office of the dean of the law school, and on the other a large and commodious students' conference-room, fitted with tables, chairs, and lockers for books and papers. On the floor above are the rooms of the professors, which open upon the gallery of the readingroom, as well as upon the corridor, and on the upper floor are the lecture rooms, the largest of which has a seating capacity of 254. These rooms, lighted mainly or ex clusively from above, with absolute freedom from external noises, with their ample space and convenient arrangement, are ideally suited to their purpose. Indeed, in all the arrangements of the school there is a degree of comfort and of studied ease from which the spaciousness of the building and the largeness of the scale on which it has been planned, do not in the least detract. The law school is none the less fortunate in the beauty and magnificence of its abode that these qualities are not the necessary or usual con comitants of an abode of learning, but are the accidental advantages of its situation in the visible centre of the life of the university.
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It shares, therefore, in a magnificence which it could not hope alone to have achieved. But the library lends more than its chaste and elevated beauty to the law school. The admirable facilities of the general library of the university are so near and easy of access that no thoughtful student can remain un affected by its proximity. The " still air of delightful studies " breathes through rooms that might otherwise gain too exclusively a professional atmosphere. The law student, in going to and from his lecture-room, passes open doors within which courses in philoso phy, history and political science are taught, rooms where the collections of books ap propriate to those studies are temptingly displayed, and if his mouth is made to water by the sight of this banquet of learn ing, he has only to enter and fall to. These outward changes in the circum stances of the school are symbolical of the transformation which it has undergone with in. From a large group of unrelated hearers attracted by a powerful personality, it has grown into a compact student-body, full of ardor, fruitful in achievement. From a body of disciples, sitting at the feet of their Gamaliel, they have become an organized band of scientific workers, calling no man Rabbi, acknowledging no master but the Truth, claiming no conquest which is not the reward of their own effort. In the days of which Professor Dwight wrote, in the arti cle already referred to, the students came trooping from their homes and offices to at tend the daily lecture, and, the lecture con cluded, dispersed to the four quarters of the city as they had come. To-day the lectures are but incidents in the work of the day, gathering and coordinating work already done and stimulating to further labor — the real workshop of the school, the library, be ing thronged with earnest students from morning till night. Nor is this an idealized or overdrawn picture. Such an atmosphere is not created in a day, but once established, it tends to its own perpetuity and more per-
