Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 01.pdf/425

382 the business of medical colleges is to prepare their students to become physicians. This practical idea is necessarily incident to professional schools of every class.

The question as to methods of study, then, is simply this; which one affords the best preparation for the practice of law; and admitting all that may be said of the danger of giving the word "practical" too narrow a meaning and overlooking, in the haste of preparation to try cases, the elements necessary to the highest ultimate success, yet it may justly be required that in a fair and broad sense the methods of study shall be practical. To this end the student needs information as well as discipline. Law consists not merely in methods, but in results. As to whole fields of its domain, it has become certain and definite, and capable of concise statement. As to many questions the period of reasoning has been passed, so that it is not for any tyro to open up the discussion again on his individual judgment as to the weight of the arguments on either side. These fields are to become familiar to the lawyer as matter of knowledge, and where else can this knowledge be more easily acquired than in the Law School? Much must be left for subsequent acquisition; but the student ought to have quite definite information as to those fundamental doctrines which have been reasoned out once for all, and have become current coin in the profession. There are certainly enough questions yet in dispute to furnish, in their investigation, the discipline required without throwing doubt and distrust over every doctrine, by presenting to the student's mind all the controversies which have arisen in the course of its history.

To limit a student's knowledge of law to what he can carve for himself out of the study of cases, in which the points have been decided, is no more reasonable than to refuse to tell the student of astronomy the distance of the sun and planets, compelling him to acquire the knowledge only by observation and calculation. He might reasonably be required to make one such calculation to become familiar with the method, but after that he can well be given definite and approved results as a basis for the solution of other questions. In every branch of knowledge the investigator is able to make progress beyond his predecessors by accepting the results they have attained, and pursuing their methods in solving new questions. The mathematician does not construct an entire table of logarithms before using logarithms in his calculation. The student of chemistry is not required to actually prove the chemical composition of water before making the knowledge thereof a basis for reasoning in reaching some result.

From these various considerations, so full a recital of which is perhaps justified by the importance and interest of the subject, the writer is led to think that study of cases should be one of the methods, but not the only method, of legal education. When the mind has once been trained into the proper way of reasoning according to the theory of the common law, there is no danger that definite information given by lecture, or reading of text-books, will be misconceived in its scope and application. Study of cases will still constitute a valuable method of acquiring knowledge as to the rule of law in particular cases, and an interesting and profitable method of fixing in the mind, by apt illustrations, the abstract rules which may be laid down by the teacher or text-writer.

It is evident that it cannot be said of any system of instruction that it is the only proper one, or the best. More, probably, is dependent upon the instructor than the method. Accordingly in this school many methods are resorted to, each instructor being at liberty to use a large discretion as to his plan of work. On elementary subjects, such as Contracts, Evidence, Bills and Notes, there are regular courses of lectures, but in each case followed by a course of recitations in a regular text-book. In Torts, Real Property, and Equity, the instruction is from text-books,