Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/198

170 I70 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. law in schools is but faintly developed. Here it is elaborate, widely favored, rapidly extending. Why is this ? Not because we originated this method. We transplanted an EngHsh root, and nurtured and developed it, while at home it was suffered to languish and die down. It was the great experiment in the University teaching of our law at Oxford, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, and the publication, a little before the American Revolu- tion, of the results of that experiment, which furnished the stim- ulus and the exemplar for our own early attempts at systematic legal education. The opportunities and the material here for any thorough work of this sort in the offices of lawyers were slight. " I never dreamed," said Chancellor Kent, in speaking of the state of things in New York, even so late as the period when he was appointed to the bench of the Supreme Court of that State in 1798, " of volumes of reports and written opinions. Such things were not then thought of. . . . There were no reports of State precedents. I first introduced a thorough examination of cases, and written opinions." ^ But wisdom, skill, experience, and an acquaintance with English books were not wanting in the legal profession here ; and Blackstone's great achievement awakened the utmost interest and enthusiasm on both sides of the water, — his success in the really Herculean task of redeeming to orderly statement and to an approximately scientific form, the disordered bulk of our common law. *'I retired to a country village," Chancellor Kent tells us, in speaking of the breaking up of Yale College by the war, where he was a student in 1779, " and, finding Blackstone's Commentaries, I read the four volumes. . . . The work inspired me at the age of fifteen with awe, and I fondly determined to be a lawyer." As a student in the office of the Attorney-General of New York, in 1 78 1 and later, he says that he read Blackstone "again and again." 2 Blackstone's lectures were begun in 1753, when the author, then only thirty years old, a discouraged barrister of seven years standing, had retired from Westminster and settled down to academic work at Oxford. On the death of Viner he was made, in 1758, the first professor of English law at any English University ; and he pubhshed his first volume of lectures in 1765. "There is abundant evidence," if we may rely upon the authority of Dr. Hammond, whose language I quote, " of the immediate absorption of nearly twenty-five hundred copies of the commentaries in the ^ Green Bag. vii. 157. 2 ibjd. 153.