Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/1013

977 BOOK REVIEWS 977 invented no new tool. Its corporate life has no institutions about which an Oxford man could feel the excitement of original and valuable discovery. But of the Harvard Law School the reverse is emphatically the case. Its theory of teaching, its method of organization, its conception of the place of the law in university studies, are all of them genuinely novel. Its great personaUties, Langdell, Thayer, Ames, Gray, are hardly less part of the traditions of Eng- lish legal learning than of American scholarship; for gratitude has led to their annexation. Mr. Justice Holmes, in a special sense a Law School man, is the one American scholar that an Englishman would rank with Bowen in judicial, and Maitland in historical, eminence. A foreigner comes to the Harvard Law School, that is to say, in something of the same spirit in which he goes to Paris and Berlin. He is in the laboratory where great discoveries have been made. This volume is an interesting monmnent to the first century of the school's life. It has value from many points of view. The History itself is a warning Ho less than an example of the difficulties in the path of original effort. The discussion of the library, with its almost nonchalant reference to its inexhaust- ible treasures, makes an Englishman almost ashamed of Codrington in Oxford and the Squire in Cambridge. The section on student life is perhaps less satis- factory. It describes, but it does not explain, why and how the indifference of the average American undergraduate to things of the mind is exchanged for an unlimited enthusiasm in the first few months of law-school life. The lives of the law-school teachers are of fascinating interest. Ames and Gray and LangdeU begin to assume the majestic proportions of Mark Pattison and Jowett. One is struck by the wide territory from which the school has drawn its teachers, and by the width of the topics they have covered in their instruction. The bibli- ography of their writings must have been an immense labor; but it is a precious possession. It leaves one almost in despair to read of what Ames, Beale, Gray, and Pound somehow managed to get written alongside their actual instruction; and the despair is deepened by contact with their quaUty. One gets the sense that nothing can be done with the same depth of learning and yet con- sistent freshness that they bring to their work. A special word is due to the Ust of books on the case-system. For America, at least, this topic is now closed; but America has stiU to convert the parent of her law. It is greatly to be hoped that the Alumni Association will use this volimie as an instnunent for produc- ing conviction. For this is the real value of the book. It is essentially a study in the method of teaching law, and its thesis, to one reader at least, seems to be unanswerable. It has triumphed because it is the only way in which principles can be studied as dialectic instead of dogma. The student makes out his own certainties, and the assistance he receives from the teacher serves less to increase the informa- tion at his disposal — that depends upon his own effort — than for the deep- ening of his perceptions. He learns the law, in fact, not as a set of rules in a handbook, but as an attempt to clarify a branch of life. But the time has passed when the classic system of Langdell was adequate by itself. With the advent of the coUectivist age, and the discovery of Europe by America, it has become essential to study law not merely in isolation but in relation to those collateral sciences which throw light upon its meaning. The study of Roman juris- prudence, of the canon law, of politics and economics, have become essential to the proper orientation of the Anglo-American system. They are advanced studies upon which embarkation is profitable rather when the common law is understood than concurrently with the attempt to understand it. Something of this, it is clear, was grasped by Ames, as also by Gray in that little book on jurisprudence which challenges preeminence with his work on perpetuities. But it has been reserved for Mr. Pound to see, in all its ramifications, the bear- ing of this new need. Mr. Justice Holmes apart, he has done more than any I