Legal education

A lawyer was a man with legal training, or some legal training and some legal skill. Most lawyers gained their pretensions by spending some time in training in the office of a member of a bar. The basic form of legal education was a kind of apprenticeship. For a fee, the lawyer-to-be read Blackstone and miscellaneous other books and copied legal documents. If he was lucky, the lawyer actually tried to teach him something.

The earliest actual law school was founded by Judge Tapping Reeve in Litchfield in 1784. At a few colleges there were professorships of law, but Reeve’s was the first law school, that is a school to train lawyers. It was established by a lawyer for lawyers, a place where a practical legal education could be obtained. The Litchfield school taught law by the lecture method. The Litchfield lectures paid more attention to commercial law, and little or none to criminal law. The full course took fourteen months, including two vacations of four weeks each. Every Saturday there was a “strict examination” on the week’s work. This school closed its doors in 1833

Ultimately, university law schools replaced the Litchfield type as the major alternative to office training. But legal training at universities was slow to get started, and well into the nineteenth century there were no “law schools” as such at universities. A few colleges taught law as part of their general curriculum. The first American chair of law was at William and Mary College. Professorships were established in the late eighteenth century at the University of Virginia, at the University of Pennsylvania. These courses, unlike the Litchfield school, were not meant to train lawyers at all. James Wilson projected a series of lectures at Pennsylvania to furnish a rational and useful entertainment to gentlemen of all professions. These were lectures on law for the general education of students and not law training, strictly speaking.

The Harvard Law School was a somewhat different animal. The first professor was Isaac Parker, chief justice of Massachusetts. He spoke of law as a science. The Harvard Law School was extremely successful. As the oldest and most successful law school, Harvard became the model for all newer schools.

In 1870 Christopher Langdell became a dean in the Harvard Law School. He turned it upside down. First, he made it harder for students to get in. An applicant without a college degree had to pass an entrance test. Next, Langdell made it harder for a student to get out. The course was raised to two years in 1871 and to three years in 1876. Under Langdell, the curriculum was divided into courses, each of so many hours or units apiece.

Langdell also introduced the case method of teaching law. He drove the textbooks out of the temple and brought in casebooks instead. These were collections of reports of actual cases, carefully selected and arranged to illustrate principles of law, what they meant and how they developed. Litchfield had attracted from all over the country.

In 1866 in Iowa two justices of the Iowa supreme court started a night school. The movement spread to other cities. The night schools were rigorously practical. They emphasized local practice far more than the national day schools. Their main vice was that they were totally trade schools. Their main merit was to open the door of legal training to poor, immigrant students. They were breeding grounds for the ethnic bar. Lower-court judges and local politicians were drawn heavily from the graduates of these schools.

One dearly sought prize was the so-called privilege. If a school had the diploma privilege, its graduates were automatically admitted to the bar, without any further exam.

The bar examination was one way to dam the flood of lawyers into the profession. Bar associations began taking an interest in legal education. The schools themselves formed a trade group, the Association of American Law Schools, around the turn of the century. Both AALS and the American Bar Association went into the accreditation business.

Answer the following questions:

1) What was the basic form of legal education in the colonies?

2) When was the earliest actual law school founded?

3) How did the Litchfield school teach law?

4) How did Langdell change the Harvard Law School?

5) What were the night schools like?

TASK 10. Explain the meaning of the following words and word combinations. Use them to make sentences of your own.

- Bar Association

- a lower-court judge

- legal training

- a justice, supreme court

- a law school

- commercial law

- apprenticeship

- a lawyer-to-be

- chief justice

- bar examination

TASK 11. Translate into English:

1. В 1866 два судьи Верховного Суда штата Айова открыли вечернюю школу. 2. Школа в Литчфилде уделяла больше внимания торговому праву и очень мало – уголовному. 3.Основной формой получения юридического образования в колониях была система ученичества. 4. Ни одна женщина не занималась юридической практикой до 1870 года. 5. Закон 1641 года запрещал выступление адвоката в суде за деньги. 6. Суды общего права предпочитали устные показания, перекрестные допросы. 7. С середины семнадцатого века торговцы оказались вовлечены в судебные тяжбы, и знания юристов приобрелы ценность на рынке. 8. Убийство первой степени – это убийство, совершенное при совершении или попытке совершения поджога, изнасилования, кражи со взломом, ограбления. 9. Только за совершение убийства первой степени преступника приговаривали к смерти.