Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/201

173 UNIVERSITY TEACHING OF ENGLISH LAW. i73 and here and there been intermittent, it has always lived and thriven somewhere ; and at last it has so commended itself that there is no longer much occasion to argue its merits. Few now come openly forward to deny or doubt them. This, then, is our American distinction, to have accepted and carried for a century into practice the doctrine that English law should be taught systematically at schools and at the Universities. President Rogers, the chairman of this Section last year, told us that there were then seventy-two schools of law in this country, of which sixty-five were associated with Universities. I am in- formed upon good authority that the number is now not under seventy-tive or seventy-six, and that the proportion of University schools is about the same as that just indicated. It behoves us now to look squarely at the meaning of these facts, and at the responsibilities that they lay upon us. The most accomplished teachers of law in England have seen with admira- tion and with something like envy the vantage-ground that has been reached here. We must not be wanting to the position in which we find ourselves. Especially we must not be content with a mere lip service, with merely tagging our law schools with the name of a University, while they lack entirely the University spirit and character. What, then, does our undertaking involve, and that conception of the study of our English system of law, which, in Blackstone's phrase, " extends the pomoeria of Univer- sity learning and adopts this new tribe of citizens within these philosophical walls " } It means this, that our law must be studied and taught as other great sciences are studied and taught at the Universities, as deeply, by like methods, and with as thorough a concentration and life-long devotion of all the powers of a learned and studious faculty. If our law be not a science worthy and requiring to be thus studied and thus taught, then, as a distin- guished lawyer has remarked, " A University will best consult its own dignity in declining to teach it." This is the plough to which our ancestors here in America set their hand and to which we have set ours ; and we must see to it that the furrow is handsomely turned. But who is there, I may be asked, to study law in this way } Who is to have the time for it and the opportunity 1 Let me ask a question in return, and answer it. Who is it that studies the natural or physical sciences, engineering, philology, history, theol- ogy, or medical science in this way } First of all, those who, for