Law School Offers What?

We have had enough of technical stuff which you are supposed to need, or at least to hear of, in order to make your case class go. It is time to go back to where we began, and to take bearings once again on what it is all about. I propose to take observations with you along three different lines. First, what is the orientation of the school with regard to the profession? What does it offer that you need? Why does it offer some things and not others? What do you need for your practice which it does not offer? To which the answer is: almost everything you will need for your practice. And, as inescapable, I shall have something to say on how to stay in the school. Tomorrow, a second line of observation: what of the law in reference to our civilization? What is it worth? How did it get that way? What does it add? In part derived from the first two, there is a third line worth pursuing as we close these lectures: what are the possibilities in studying law? To what end? What is there in the study worth the having?

Now to the school, and first, to the curriculum. What is its aim? We have already seen that it has two aims at least. One is to equip you for the practice, the other to equip you for itself. Let me begin with equipping you for practice.

And there, I suppose, the first thing which occurs to you, as the first which would normally occur to any man, is that you need to "learn the law". That you need information, knowledge; that you become the repository of the rules. I am Sir Oracle--and when I ope my mouth let no dog bark. Would, gentlemen, that we could make you so! But between us and the making stretches, looms, a bulk of learning which three years can never compass, which, I think fair to say, no life-time is enough to compass. Any system of law bulks large enough. The law of a high civilization bulks out of all understanding. Our own law is the regulation of the clashes of interest in a society so complex we gasp before it. Even then, there might be some hope of learning much of it--for rules are all abstract. Even if one has to wrestle with a dozen cases for each rule, to see its meaning, the abstraction reduces the ground "to be covered". The rules, laid end to end, no longer stretch so many miles. And so, in France or Germany, where great portions of the rules have been reduced to systematic codes, law study gallops desperately across these stretches, endeavoring to heel the aspirant on All the law. The task is made relatively easy by the fact that the codes are cleanly thought out, well-ordered books, neatly enough phrased in the main, and wide in their scope. The task is made relatively easy, also, by there being in substance but a single system of law for Germany, a single system for France. One legislature, one supreme court. And despite this, the instructors throw up their hands and pant at the impossibility of what they try. Despite this the worry grows at the hopeless overabstraction of what they teach. So much so that in Germany, for instance, a sort of legal interneship three years in length follows upon the three or four years' academic study before the young man is allowed to take up practice.