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The Green Bag
lecturer had among his auditors the "President of the United States and his Cabinet, the Houses of Congress, the Executive and Legislative Departments of the Governments of the State of Pennsylvania, and the City of Phila delphia, the Judges of the Courts, the members of the Bar," and a brilliant array of ladies. But if these law pro fessorships were established in the hope of developing into professional schools of law, each failed of its purpose. They failed none the less if they were patterned after the professorship of law which the author of Viner's Abridgment had founded at the University of Oxford for the benefit of non-professional stu dents of the common law, and which in 1765 bore fruit in Blackstone's Com mentaries. In the latter aspect these early law professorships may some day serve as precedents when our universities, espe cially our state universities, recognize the need of affording the layman an opportunity to study the law of the land. In their own day, however, their fate served strongly to confirm lawyers in the belief that university law school teaching could not succeed in America. Successful university law schools were, of course, well known to continental lawyers. The fame "of the mother of all the universities," the University of Bologna, rested chiefly on her school of law, which was founded about the year 1088, and for generations drew students of law from the four quarters of Europe. To it, in the latter end of the twelfth century, came Englishmen, to study law under Azo, "master of all the masters of law"; and it was from Azo's pub lished works that the author of the first organic treatise on English law, Bracton, writing in the middle of the thirteenth century, drew the general
conception, the arrangement and the classification of his book. r|,J,The law school at Bologna brought others in its train. They flourished, these university law schools, in Italy, in France, in Spain, in Germany. At the opening of the nineteenth century the university law school was not only the accepted method of legal education on the Continent, but it was supported by the traditions of seven centuries. These seven centuries, however, were without effect on the methods of legal education in England and America. Our traditional theory demanded law office instruction and the atmosphere of the courts. Nor was this unnatural, in the earlier stages of our law. We now define law as a science to be learned out of books; but for centuries the common law of England, whether regarded as a science or as an art, could be effectively studied only as it arose, in the courts at Westminster. Our books of the law were still to come. The long series of Year Books bear witness, it may be, to the earnest efforts of law students to catch the law living as it rose. In the absence of a native corpus juris a professional school of law was well nigh impossible at Oxford or Cambridge. There was the preference of the ecclesiastics, who were in control at the universities, for the civil and the canon law; there was also the reason given by Fortescue, that "at the universities of England the sciences are not taught but in the Latin tongue, and the laws of the land are to be learned in the three several tongues, to witte, in the English tongue, the French tongue, and the Latin tongue"; but if these obstacles to the study of the common law at the univer sities had been removed, there would still have remained a more serious diffi culty — the lack of an adequate written
