The State University Law School basis of investigation and instruction in our growing body of native law. This deficiency could, no doubt, have been supplied long before the year 1800. But the tradition in favor of law office instruction had by that time taken deep root in England and America. The professional students of law, turning away from the universities which offered them nothing, gathered around the seat of the courts at Westminster. Even while the Inns of Court were active in the work of legal instruction, the students were in daily and diligent attendance on the courts. When the Inns ceased to give actual instruction, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the law students were brought into still closer touch with the law offices, the actual work of the courts, and the study of law as an art. Such was their daily habit of life for centuries; it is not surprising that the vision of a professional law school on a university campus, remote from the courts and the haunts of law yers, was regarded as foreign to the genius of the common law. For many years after the opening of the nine teenth century our prevailing theory of legal education was essentially the theory presented in Fortescue's De Laudibus. When the Prince enquires why the laws of England, being so excellent, are not taught in the universities, the Chancellor informs him that they are taught in a better place, in the Inns of Court, situated "where the courts of law are held, and in which the law proceedings are pleaded and argued, and resolutions of the court, upon cases which arise, are given by the judges." That an American university could successfully maintain a school of medi cine was not questioned. A medical school had been established in the Col lege of Philadelphia, the forerunner of the University of Pennsylvania, in
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1765, in King's College, the lineal an cestor of Columbia, in 1767, at Har vard in 1782, at Dartmouth in 1798. But the doubt whether a university law school could succeed held the minds of the profession until after 1850. Pro fessor Dwight, speaking of the origin of the Columbia Law School, has borne witness to the misgiving, the trepida tion, with which that school was opened in New York City in 1858. "Even thinking men, who believed in schools of theology and in colleges of medicine, had little or no faith in schools of law." It was in such circumstances, and with this cloudy horizon, that our first state university law school was launched, at the University of Virginia. The year was 1826, the year in which the Yale Law School, already existing on a private foundation, became formally incorpor ated in the college. It was three years before the beginning of the new era of the Harvard Law School under Story. This Virginia State Law School was definitely designed, not as a law pro fessorship for the instruction of laymen in the law of the land, but as a complete professional school of law. Its design, however, reached further than mere technical training for practice at the bar. The state, in Jefferson's view, had an interest of its own to serve in affording an opportunity for the professional study of law. It owed to itself the duty to train up a young lawyer in the way he should go, that when he entered the legislature he might not depart from it. In a letter to James Madison, under date of February 26, 1826, Mr. Jefferson has this to say : — "In the selection of our Law Professor, we must be rigorously attentive to his political principles. You will recollect that before the Revolution, Coke Littleton was the Universal elementary book of law students, and a sounder Whig never wrote, nor of profounder learning in the orthodox doctrines of the British consti
