THE GREEN BAG
THE EDUCATION OF THE GERMAN LAWYER BY KARL VON LEWINSKI DO not expect that I will in this short time offer to you a scientific and comprehensive statement of all the laws, provisions and rules, produced by German Parliaments and Governments to regulate legal education in Germany. I merely intend to give you a short general picture of the development and life of the average German law students. A lawyer remains a student all his life. That is true in Germany as well as in America, but I will not go so far — I shall confine my picture to the time of preparation for the three different aims which a German lawyer may reach in the usual course of affairs. That means, I will describe his development until he is appointed Judge or State Attorney or until he is ad mitted to the bar as Counsellor at Law. I will say immediately that the two principal careers of a German lawyer, Bench and Bar, are not connected in the same way as in this country. Here the Judges are taken from the Bar. Only members of the Bar of much experience are elected or appointed Judges. The Bench is founded, is built on the foundation of the Bar. This is entirely different in Germany, where the two careers do not follow each other but are parallel to each other. The tree begins to grow in two separate parts as soon as it is above the ground of preparatory education which education however is common to both parts. The development of the German lawyer really begins with the so-called gymnasium course, — not gymnasium in the American sense of the word, a gymnasium being a school where the work not only covers the American High School course but also claims to cover at least the first two years of an American average college. Without excep tion everybody has to graduate from this school who intends to serve mankind in a
scientific way be it medicine, philos ophy, philology, theology or jurisprudence. He has to enter the gymnasium when not less than nine years old, after passing through a preparatory course of three years in. a grammar school, and has to remain there for a full nine years. He is at least eighteen, on the average nineteen years old when he passes his final examination. He is now ready to enter the University. The University is the second necessary step in the German lawyer's development. It is impossible for him to follow the legal profession without visiting the University and studying law there for a period of at least three years, — in some states, as for instance in Bavaria, for a period of four years. Colleges in the American sense are un known in Germany. We have only Univer sities. The general education provided for in the American colleges is supposed to be given partly in the gymnasium and partly in the University, there combined with some specific study. There is no student in Ger many who is simply a "student," swimming in the broad stream of general knowledge. The German student has to decide immedi ately whether he is to be lawyer, physician, clergyman, etc. His preparation for the study of law is limited to what his historical instructor in the gymnasium has taught him. He knows that Drakon gave to the Greeks the most cruel laws which ever existed. He knows that the Romans were a people of Legislators and that the Emperor Justinian made a famous compilation of the Roman law. But he does not know anything about the contents of these laws. He looks at them only from a historical not from a legal standpoint. On the whole the German student has not so much to guide him in making a choice of
