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The Green Bag

tution, or in what were called English liberties. You remember also that our lawyers were then all Whigs. But when his black-letter text, and uncouth but cunning learning got out of fashion, and the honeyed Mansfieldism of Blackstone became the students' horn book, from that moment, that profession (the nursery of our Congress) began to slide into Toryism, and nearly all of the young brood of lawyers now are of that hue. They suppose themselves, indeed, to be Whigs, because they no longer know what Whigism or republicanism means. It is in our seminary that that vestal flame is to be kept alive; it is thence it is to spread anew over our own and the sister states. If we are true and vigilant in our trust, within a dozen or twenty years a majority of our own legislature will be from one school, and many deciples will have carried its doctrines home with them to their several states, and will have leavened thus the whole mass."1

Notwithstanding the prejudice of the profession in favor of the atmosphere of the courts and law offices, this new law school was established not in any populous centre, nor at the state capitol, nor at the door of a court house, but on the campus of a newly created uni versity a mile beyond a little town in Piedmont, Virginia. If the situation of the Harvard Law School at Cambridge was so unfortunate as to imperil its success, as some confidently asserted, the situation of the Law School of the University of Virginia should have meant its speedy death. Yet the school was a shining success. Neither the stress of civil war nor the presence of armies in line of battle along its horizon broke the continuity of its sessions. It with stood even the devastation of the recon struction days. The same faith in university law school teaching and the same sense of duty resting on the state to train those who were preparing for admission to the bar, were more strikingly manifested sixteen years later, when the second 1 For this extract from Mr. Jefferson's correspond ence I am indebted to Mr. Lile. Dean of the Uni versity of Virginia Law School.

state university law school was founded. This occurred in the remote hillcountry of southern Indiana, where, since the year 1820, a few far-seeing men had been laboring to build up an institution of higher learning. As early as 1835, the Board of Trustees of what was then Indiana College sought to open a school of law as a department of the college. They went so far as to call the foremost lawyer of his day in Indiana, Isaac Blackford, to be the first professor of law in the new school. Three years later the act of the legis lature which converted the college into the present Indiana University expressly included "law" among the sciences which should be taught. A university school of law was accordingly opened at Bloomington, Indiana, as a department of this new state university, in 1842. Four years later a law school was established at the University of North Carolina — the third in order of the state university law schools. In 1854 the present Law Department of the University of Mississippi was opened. In 1859 the University of Michigan, founded in 1837, opened its law school, with Judge Cooley as its resident pro fessor. Thus begun, the movement towards state university law schools was at first both slow and halting. The semi centennial of the beginning of the move ment showed only ten schools — the five already mentioned, and the law schools of the University of Georgia, the University of Wisconsin, the Uni versity of Iowa, and the University of Missouri. But the succeeding thirtyfive years have added twenty-four schools to the list, seven of which appear within the five years beginning in 1906. The growth and vigor of the schools themselves within the last five years