Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/444

418 4l8 HARVARD LAW REVIEW, A MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH LEGAL EDUCATION. ENGLISH law is the parent of the law of this country, almost ' as much as English speech is the foundation of our speech. After one hundred and twenty years of separate government our laws and our language still acknowledge, not British dominion, but the potent influence of usage and systems kindred with our own, prevailing and developing among a people bound more closely to ours than any other, by the ties of the past and of the future, by sentiment and origin no less than by material interests. We have, as a nation, adhered strongly to the English type of law even in statutes and codes. We have felt an unswerving attachment to the jury system, and to trial in criminal cases before a judge who sits as an "impartial umpire" between the State and the accused. We have never sympathized with the continental method of prose- cution which Sir James Fitz James Stephen called " inquisitorial," as compared with the English " litigious " system. Numbers of our earliest lawyers studied in the English Inns of Court. Edward Tilghman, Edward Shippen, Benjamin Chew, and William Rawle had studied in the Middle Temple, and Andrew Hamilton is be- lieved to have studied in Gray's Inn. The bar of this country must trace its " apostolic succession," like the historical churches, through English channels. In considering legal education in Eng- land we consider a training which very directly affects us, and which our methods have in late years largely influenced. An English decision is as much an authority before our State courts as a decision from a sister Commonwealth within the republic, and our Federal courts give even greater heed to it. The training which forms the bench and bar of England, therefore, is of more than speculative interest to us. Moreover, a man serves his home best who seeks to bring to it all that is best in the rest of the world, and a constant observation upon the progress of other nations is a test and condition of advancement in our own. We will say, with Sir Frederick Pollock, " Benedictus qui venit in nomine Legum Anglicer We are not disposed, however, to recount the old story of how an unsuccessful barrister, in the middle of the last century, began at