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The Columbia Law School of To-day.
the modern educational revival which is seems but yesterday that the name Columbia transforming our homes, and schools, and College was used as the common designation universities before our eyes; to measure the of a group of unrelated academic and pro effect of the new and more exacting de fessional schools. To-day the institution is mands of our complex social and industrial recognized, the world over, as perhaps the life, with its insistence on training as the most characteristic university of the western condition of sharing in its rewards; to world. It is too plain for demonstration gauge the stimulus afforded by the historic that such a revival of learning as this paper and scientific methods of education, so fruit has portrayed could not be an isolated phe fully applied of late in the field of our com nomenon. Nor, indeed, could it have taken mon law; to take note of the contribution of root and flourished without favoring influ an awakened bar, demanding a better profes ences from the outside, nor otherwise than sional equipment than has been furnished in a wide area of stimulating conditions. heretofore.* But these agencies of educa- The spirit of free inquiry — testing all things, cational progress, powerful and efficient holding fast only that which is good — to though they be, are but indirect or remote which the law school attributes its successful causes, and cannot be dealt with here. There growth — what is it, after all, but the uni versity spirit, which has taken the disjecta is, however, one potent influence, so immedi ate and controlling, that no consideration of membra of the old Columbia and re-created the Columbia Law School and its develop them into a form of beauty, and breathed ment can be had without including it, and into them the breath of life. And if the that is the rise of Columbia University. It law school has contributed her share to
- Witness the action of the American Bar Association at this revival, she has in her turn been power
the meeting held in Cleveland last summer, in recommend fully stimulated by the regenerating current ing that the course of instruction in law schools be pulsing from the heart of the university. lengthened to three years.
