sity proper in another, and where there is local and institutional jealousy. The man, as I said, to lead this advance and to coordinate these things, is the bar examiner. He is the custodian of legal education. He is a state officer, an officer of the court, the only one, in fact, whose duty it is to examine into the question. He would be a power before any legislative committee.

But, on the other hand, it would be absurd for any one to underrate the value of a knowledge of the rules of pleading and practice, of the vast unwritten code of local procedure, and, above all, of business methods and principles. I often think that a knowledge of the latter is almost as important as of pleading and practice itself. The lawyer must, to a large extent, be a business man. He must, at any rate, be the adviser and counselor of business men; yet there are hundreds of graduates of law schools, hundreds of college graduates, who would have to be introduced to a bill of lading if they met it on the street, and are totally ignorant of business methods and customs. Yet I am inclined to believe that these things cannot be thoroughly acquired in the law schools. The methods of business, the business mind, must be met with and encountered before they can be understood. Court procedure and pleading and practice, and, above all, the unwritten rules of the courts and the customs of the profession, must, like true conversion, be personally experienced. Many law school gentlemen will say, "No," but the bar examiners uniformly agree with me, and the practicing lawyers agree with me also. I believe that an apprenticeship in the office and an actual acquaintance with the methods of practice are as necessary to the young lawyer as actual experience in the hospital is to the young surgeon. Many surgeons, it is true, have never had it, but-"the providences of God are inscrutable, and dead men tell no tales."

Personally I would favor a probationary period. I do not believe that the law school

should be expected to teach a man to l practical lawyer. I do not believe in turnir. our law colleges into business colleges; but, on the other hand, I believe that the pu should be protected. The study of the Law should be encouraged, because it is necessary to an intelligent citizenship; but there is b reason for unduly encouraging the increase of the number of practicing lawyers. I much to commend in the ideas expressed by Mr. Lucien Alexander in his admirable pa per before the Section of Legal Education at Narragansett Pier some years ago. Ile, you will remember, advocated that law school graduates should, before being admitted to the bar, be required to spend one year as bona fide clerks or assistants in law offices, or that the law schools themselves should "provide one year or more of training de voted largely to matters of practice for those gentlemen of legal education desirous of he ing called to the bar, and which might prop erly be designated as post-graduate courses in practice." I would, however, recommend that this added training be given after the first bar examinations; that, on passing them, the order of the court shall be that all su cessful candidates shall be admitted to the bar one year from date, provided that at that time they are able to furnish evidence of one year's actual clerkship in an office, or the actual study of local law and local procedure. On the other hand, as I have before stated, I insist that the office students shall be required to reach the same general standards of scholarship as the graduates of the law schools.

The election of officers for the Section for the ensuing year resulted as follows: Chairman, Harry S. Richards, Dean Uni

versity of Wisconsin School of Law. Secretary, Charles M. Hepburn, University of Indiana School of Law.

HE so-called "case system" which I

THE

here venture to call into question is entrenched behind a barrier of authority almost impervious to direct attack. However, a novel and independent view of even a more venerable institution may sometimes be of interest, and fair and truthful criticism is obnoxious only to men of narrow spirit or the exponents of a doubtful cause.

In the interest of clearness it may be well to begin by definition. The expression or formula "case system" is used in three almost entirely distinct, if not mutually repugnant, meanings: First, in the sense in which its originator used it and in which it was never a real case system at all; secondly, in the sense in which we so often see it used in the catalogues and other advertising matter of law schools to express the "casebook system," or the nearest approach to carrying out Professor Langdell's original idea of which its inherent impracticability permitted; and, thirdly, in a new sense, in which a real case system is more or less unconsciously employed by all successful and practical law schools. By way of preface to what follows it may be said that a system peculiarly adapted to the study of one sort of thing may be equally ill-adapted to the study of an essentially antipodal branch of human learning. For instance, if we speak reverently of ancient philosophy on the one hand, but of modern science on the other, this suggestive mode of speech results from a realization of the fact that real philosophy is as old as Confucius, Buddha, Aris

totle, Plato, and the Christ, and that its ultimate facts and truths were as well known, or as intelligently denied, two thousand years ago as they are to-day. The fundamental reason why there has been no great advance in the philosophy of to-day over that of centuries ago, why, for example, if we attempted to draw up a federal Constitution to-day, it would not be readily admitted to be greatly superior to that of our great-great-grandfathers, is because the same methods of approaching such subjects would be and are now being used that were being used then, methods then and now universally employed in such divisions of mental activity for the very reason that they are appropriate to the attainment of the best results when applied to the particular subject matters under investigation.

If science worthy of the name is modern science exclusively, it is because a relatively new method of study and investigation, the inductive method, has come to be universally employed, and a priori argument has yielded to the inquisitive microscope. The modern scientist says to his brother or to his pupil: "Do not take what I say about it. Do not take what anybody says about it. Examine with your own eyes, touch with your own hands, then think with your own brain, and draw your own conclusions." It being premised or postulated that you have a brain capable of thinking and independence enough to form your own conclusions. A few decades ago this comparatively new, but essentially simple, method of dealing with the phenom

ena of the sciences, whether biological, chemico-physical, or mechanical, had spread from the laboratories of the investigators, the pioneers of science, to the schools, and, very logically and properly, the same methods (so far at least as methods adapted to original research can be used by way of a sort of object lesson verification by the student) were beginning to be applied in the universities to the acquisition of a first-hand knowledge of the sciences as were already universally in vogue in extending them and to which their marvelous modern development was due.

It was at this time that Prof. Langdell of Harvard, swept along by this current of modern scientific method and thought then being introduced in the other schools of that important university, conceived the idea of extending to legal science and to schools of law the same loosely styled "inductive method" used so successfully in the other scientific schools. "Let the law student," said he, in effect, "stop taking what other people say about the law. Let him disregard, or at least cease to attend exclusively to, the opinions and conclusions of others concerning the phenomena of the law; but let him investigate these phenomena at first hand and for himself and draw his own conclusions." Admirable advice and quite in the spirit of modern scientific thought, assuming that law is a science; and it is not my present purpose to engage in a dispute as to whether it is or is not a science, but rather a branch of philosophy akin to ethics, and dowried with peculiar importance through its marriage to the art of practice. Let us concede that it is a quasi-science in the same sense that we have a so-called social science and political science. The real gist of the controversy turns, not upon that question, but upon the answer to the question, "What

are the phenomena of the science of the law, with which the student should have a first-hand acquaintance, and to which the inductive method may at least the oretically be applied?"

One might suppose that, as in the science of ethics its phenomena are the mor al relations arising among and between the units of society, so in legal science its phenomena are the legal relations of the social units both with the state and between themselves, which arise from an intercourse somewhat minutely regulated by customs which change from time to time in harmony with changing social and economic conditions, or by statutes expressing the more or less stable will of the majority. In the case of both law and ethics the phenomena to be studied at first hand are the very legal relations or ethical relations themselves, formed and resulting from the activities of the social units, and not somebody's opinions concerning these relations. And this is equally true, whether the opinions. of that somebody have been arrived at inductively or a priori. In neither case is it scientific to adopt the opinions of oth ers, unless they coincide with conclusions drawn from a first-hand examination of the data upon which they are based; and this is as true of that branch of the "synthetic philosophy" of Spencer which deals with the subject of ethics or of general sociology as it is, for example, of the opinion of Blackstone concerning what were the phenomena of the English customary law at the date he wrote. The things to be examined, with or without the aid of the microscope, are the customs of England of two centuries ago themselves as they existed independently in nature, and not Blackstone's opinions and conclusions about them. Perhaps some gifted Galileo, enrolled in a case law school, may yet find, as a result of