532
THE GREEN BAG
stant practice at the real thing. There could be no simpler rule than that requir ing an exception to be taken in order to preserve an overruled objection for appeal, and yet a failure to do this was one of the most frequent errors in practice which I found in the reports of the four states which I examined. The lawyers who made this mistake knew better, but they forgot, and it is hardly conceivable that they would have done better had they participated in a few mock jury trials before beginning practice. These are the reasons why I do not think that a law school of high grade which offers more courses in substantive law than can
be taken in three years, should encourage its students to spend any of their school hours in trying mock jury cases. The really difficult things about trial litigation cannot be learned in this way, and the easy ones can be acquired elsewhere with an expen diture of less valuable time. I do not lay any particular stress upon the fact that the great majority of lawyers do practically no trial work. This would be a good reason for making such work elective, but not for omitting it entirely, if we believed that the law school could do work in this direction comparable in value to what it does in sub stantive law. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, Aug., 1905.
