Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/203

175 UNIVERSITY TEACHING OF ENGLISH LAW. I7S physical science, unless you have a body of learned teachers ; and you cannot have a learned faculty of law unless, like other facul- ties, they give their lives to their work. The main secret of teaching law, as of all teaching, is what Socrates declared to be the secret of eloquence, understanding your subject ; and that requires, as regards any one of the great heads of our law, in the present stage of our science, an enormous and absorbing amount of labor. Consider how vast the material of our law is, and what the sub- ject-matter is which is to be explored, studied, understood, classi- fied, and taught in our schools of law. It lies chiefly in an immense mass of judicial decisions. These, during several centuries, have spelled out in particular instances, and applied to a vast and per- petually shifting variety of situations, certain inherited principles, formulas, and customs, and certain rules and maxims of good sense and of an ever-developing sense of justice. It lies partly, also, in a quantity of legislation. What does it mean to ascertain and to master, upon any particu- lar topic, the common law .? It means to ascertain and master, in that particular part of it, the true outcome of this body of material. In an old subject, like the law of real property, such an inquiry goes far back. In a new one, like constitutional law, not so far; but still, even in that we must search for more than a century, and if we would have a just understanding of some fundamental matters, it means much remoter and collateral investigation. As regards a great part of our law it is not comprehensible, in the sense in which a legal scholar must comprehend his subject, unless something be known, nay, much, of the great volume of English decisions that run back six hundred years to the days of Edward the First, when English legal reporting begins. That is the period which is fixed, in the two noble volumes of " The History of the English Law " just published by the English professors, Sir Freder- ick Pollock of Oxford and Mr. Maitland of Cambridge, as the end of their labors ; viz., the time when legal reporting begins. In giving the reasons for dealing with this as a separate period, they say "so continuous has been our EnglislWegal life during the last six centuries, that the law of the later Middle Ages has never been forgotten among us. It has never passed utterly outside the cog- nisance of our courts and our practising lawyers." Such is the long tradition that finds expression in the law of this very day, and of this place in which we sit. The volumes just mentioned, ending thus six centuries ago, themselves throw light on much