Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/227

201 NEW YORK STATE BOARD OF LAW EXAMINERS. 201 In September, 1876, in a paper read at a meeting of the Ameri- can Social Science Association held at Saratoga, Mr. Lewis L. Delafield, in describing the condition of legal education and ad- mission to the bar in New York, said : — " Unhappily the law gave to the three principal schools the pernicious privilege of having their graduates admitted to the bar upon presentation of the school diploma, and without the public examination in open court, required by the rules. The charters of the schools varied greatly ; the graduates of the Hamilton Law School might be admitted whenever they could pass an examination in the school, without reference to the time of their studies ; the Albany and University schools might admit in thirty-six weeks, and the Columbia School in eighteen months, without any public examination. The difference and the privilege were alike unreasonable. This partial legislation naturally led to evasion. The Columbia College School construed the eighteen months required by the Statute as meaning academic months, and thus reduced the term to fif- teen statute months. In the competition which ensued, all conditions of fitness were overlooked, no preliminary examinations were required, the school catalogues announced that no examinations and no particular course of previous study were necessary for admission. In all the schools the professors themselves conducted the examinations for admis- sion to the bar. Thus, the singular spectacle was presented of first inviting all, however unfitted, to study law, and then admitting them to practice upon the report of their instructors."^ During several years after 1876, when the Court of Appeals of New York adopted rules requiring a public examination of appli- cants for admission to the bar, the Legislature passed acts exempt- ing graduates of New York law schools from the necessity of taking such an examination. For many years before 1894 the General Term of the Supreme Court in each of the five Judicial Departments had been in the habit of appointing from the bar a committee, which usually con- sisted of three members, to conduct examinations for admission to the bar. In some departments there were both oral and written examinations, while in at least one department there was no writ- ten examination and the oral examination did not deserve the name. In that department the efforts of the bar to raise the standard of examinations, or, rather, to create some standard, met with continued and stubborn opposition by the Presiding Justice of i Penn. Monthly for 1876, vol. 7, p. 960.