WAYS IN WHICH PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS ARE ELEVATING
EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS

Frederick C. Woodward, Professor of Law and Vice-President,
University of Chicago

Broadly speaking, the education of lawyers in continental Europe is intrusted to state-controlled universities; in England, to the lawyers themselves. In America the English tradition naturally was followed. The law student read law in the office of a member of the bar; and while some instruction in law was given in the colleges and universities at an earlier day, and a few private law schools were maintained for brief periods, there was no university law school worthy of the name until Judge Story went to Harvard in 1829. The Harvard Law School, under Story, quickly prospered, and in 1844 had 163 students. Its success stimulated other universities, and during the period from 1840 to 1860 new law schools were established at the rate of nearly one a year. At the outbreak of the Civil War there were in the United States twenty-two degree-conferring law schools; in 1870 there were 31; in 1890, 61; in 1910, 124; in 1920, 142. At the outbreak of the war with Germany there were 23,000 law school students in the United States.1

One might expect to find that the rapid increase, especially between 1890 and 1920, in the number of law schools and of law students was accompanied by a rapidly increasing influence upon the educational standards of the profession. Such, however, was not the case. In some states examinations for admission to the bar were considerably stiffened, as the result, in part, of pressure by the schools. The period of law study required of candidates was also, in some states, considerably lengthened. But the general education required was nowhere more than that represented by graduation from a high school, and in many states there was no general education requirement whatever. Furthermore, the law student was everywhere still permitted to acquire his technical training in a law office instead of a law school—a method which meant something in the days when lawyers had the leisure to give instruction to their apprentices and in many cases felt the responsibility for so doing, but which, even in the latter part of the eighties, had become an obvious sham. What were the reasons for the persistence, even up to 1920, of standards appropriate enough for a sparsely settled country with few colleges and fewer law schools, but astonishing, to say the least, in twentieth-century America?

The chief underlying reason, of course, was the democratic tradition; the distrust of all forms of aristocracy; the fear of privileged classes; the conviction, or at least the profound feeling, that the bar, which plays so large a part in shap

For these figures, and for much of the factual material upon which this paper is based, the writer is indebted to Dr. Alfred Z. Reed's Training for the Public Profession of the Law, published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1921, and to the reports of the President of the Carnegie Foundation.

ing our political institutions and in making and administering our laws, must be open on easy terms to all. "Look at Abraham Lincoln!" was the conclusive answer to every argument for the elevation of educational standards. But there were more particular reasons, which may not be so familiar to you. One was the lack of an effective and responsible organization of the bar. There was an American Bar Association; there were state, and county, and city bar associations. But, with very few exceptions, they were pitiably weak and lacking in serious purpose. The American Bar Association, it is true, had a section on legal education, and for a time the meetings of this section and of the Association of American Law Schools, of which I shall say more later, were held in close connection with each other. But the section on legal education showed so little sympathy with the modest proposals of the Association of Law Schools for raising educational standards that the law school men were discouraged and, in large measure, alienated. Another reason for the persistence of law standards, at least in regard to general education, was the conservatism or timidity of the law schools themselves. It was not until 1908 that the Association of American Law Schools ventured even to express the hope that all member schools would ultimately require two years of college work of their students. In 1920 only thirty-one schools, less than half of the university law schools, to say nothing of evening law schools, actually required as much as two years of college work for entrance. There were reasons for this conservatism, one of which was the fear that, in view of the lack of support from the American Bar Association and the profession, the major result of higher standards would be to drive the students in large numbers into the proprietary evening law schools. But whatever the reasons, the university law schools as a whole were not showing a vigorous leadership in the matter of general education.

So much for the conditions which prevailed up to 1920. I have said nothing of methods of teaching or of scholastic standards within the schools. There had been marked progress in these respects, and also in the character of law school faculties and curriculums. But the educational requirements for admission to the bar, as I have pointed out, were lamentably low, and there seemed little prospect of substantial improvement. It is not too much to say that those who had at heart the lifting of the bar to the position of a true profession were profoundly discouraged.

Then, in 1921, occurred an event which revived our hopes, and which probably will prove to have marked the opening of a new era. The American Bar Association at last put its hands to the plough. Elihu Root, a former president of the association, had been persuaded to accept the chairmanship of the section on legal education and to appoint a special committee on education, of which he was chairman. Just how this was brought about is an interesting story, but I cannot tell it now. Ostensibly, the law school men had nothing to do with it. Experience had taught them that any program openly advocated by them would be looked upon with disfavor. Their influence was exercised, however, in a per

fectly legitimate way. The committee made a study of the situation for itself, and also had the benefit of the elaborate and thorough study made by Dr. Reed for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In due season it brought in a long, carefully prepared, and vigorous report recommending the adoption of the following resolutions:

1. The American Bar Association is of the opinion that every candidate for admission to the bar should give evidence of graduation from a law school complying with the following standards:

(a) It shall require as a condition of admission at least two years of study in a college. (b) It shall require its students to pursue a course of three years' duration if they devote substantially all of their working time to their studies, and a longer course, equivalent in the number of working hours, if they devote only part of their working time to their studies.

(c) It shall provide an adequate library available for the use of the students.

(d) It shall have among its teachers a sufficient number giving their entire time to the school to insure actual personal acquaintance and influence with the whole student body.

2. The American Bar Association is of the opinion that graduation from a law school should not confer the right of admission to the bar, and that every candidate should be subjected to an examination by public authority to determine his fitness.

3. The Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar is directed to publish from time to time the names of those law schools which comply with the above standards and of those which do not, and to make such publications available so far as possible to intending law students.

4. The president o the Association and the Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar are directed to cooperate with the state and local bar associations to urge upon the duly constituted authorities of the several states the adoption of the above requirements for admission to the bar.

5. The Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar is directed to call a Conference on Legal Education in the name of The American Bar Association, to which the state and local bar associations shall be invited to send delegates, for the purpose of uniting the bodies represented in an effort to create conditions favorable to the adoption of the principles above set forth.

This report was undoubtedly a shock to many of the "oldtimers" in the Bar Association, and there was a long debate in which the name of Lincoln was, of course, frequently heard. But two forces worked mightily in its favor; first, the prestige of Elihu Root and of Chief Justice Taft, who spoke vigorously and convincingly in support of the recommendations; second, the growing number and influence of lawyers who had themselves obtained both a college and a law school education. Many of these had worked their way through both college and law school, and clearly realized the difference between the conditions of Lincoln's day and of their own. In the end, the recommendations were adopted in full and by an impressive majority.

Immensely cheered by this action, the Association of Law Schools at its next meeting voted that after 1925 all of its member schools must require at least two years of preliminary college work. The Council on Legal Education of the American War Association at once proceeded to prepare, and in due time published, its list of the law schools which met the Association standards, a list

which now comprises sixty-four schools, as against thirty-one schools which required two years of college work in 1920. The Council also called a conference of legal education, as directed by the American Bar Association, at which most of the state bar associations and many of the city bar associations were represented by delegates. At this conference, which was held in Washington in 1922, the resolutions were again debated at length, and again the recommendations, in substance, prevailed:

We believe [the conference said] that the adoption of these standards will increase the efficiency and strengthen the character of those coming to the practice of law, and will therefore tend to improve greatly the administration of justice. We therefore urge the bar associations of the several states to draft rules of admission to the bar carrying the standards into effect, and to take such action as they may deem advisable to procure their adoption.

Do not be misled. The fight for these standards has just begun. Remember that the power to make rules governing admission to the bar rests, not in bar associations, but in the legislatures or in the courts. In no state have the recommendations of 1921 yet been adopted in full. West Virginia has adopted them to go into effect in 1928; Kansas now requires two years of college work or its equivalent, and so will Illinois after July 1 of this year, but neither has yet required a law school education as distinguished from study in a law office; a few other states have taken steps in the right direction. At best, it will be many years before the new standards will have anything like general acceptance; but the movement has begun, and I am confident that it will gather force with time.

Meanwhile the university law schools, in increasing number, are requiring three or four years of preliminary college study instead of two, and some of them, following the leadership of Harvard again, as so often in the past, are adding a fourth year to the law school curriculum. This additional year is still in large measure a matter of experiment. In my judgment it is unlikely that it will become, in the near future, a requirement for the ordinary professional degree. The tendency, rather, is in the direction of making it a year of special training for students who contemplate a career of teaching and research, with the requirement of a dissertation and leading to a doctorate in jurisprudence or the science of law. We are looking forward, in other words, to the better education of law teachers, not only that they may be better teachers in the narrow sense, but that they may be better qualified to take the lead in the great movements already under way for the simplification of the law and the improvement of its administration. That a great part of the burden of these tasks must be borne by the law faculties of our universities is widely recognized. If it is to be borne worthily, we must give to the law teachers of the future at once a broader and a more intensive training. We must encourage them to cultivate the neglected border lands between law and the other social sciences; we must, so far as possible, aid them to integrate the law and the other social sciences; we must stimulate their curiosity to know just how our law functions, and to discover how it might be made to function with higher efficiency; we must give them practice in the art

of simplification. In this direction, I believe, lie the next steps in elevating our educational standards. And you will not have failed to observe that it is a direction in which we cannot go very far without the cooperation of the economist, the political scientist, the sociologist, and the student of social service administration.

WHERE IN SOCIAL WORK CAN THE CONCEPT OF

DEMOCRACY BE APPLIED?

Kenneth L. M. Pray, Director of the Pennsylvania School of Social
and Health Work, Philadelphia

We are concerned in this discussion with two of those elusive concepts in which individual predilections and experience are so intertwined with group traditions and institutions as almost to preclude a general definition whose validity is widely accepted. As to democracy, wars have been fought over the interpretation of the content of the term; no two generations have conceived it alike, nor has anyone even approached the exemplification in practice of its own democratic ideal. The changing and uncertain content of the concept "social work" is clearly exposed in the sequence of earlier descriptive terms, "charity," "philanthropy," "social service," and in the continued currency of all of them in common usage as almost, if not quite, interchangeable among themselves and with the later and perhaps somewhat broader term, "social work."

Yet, surviving all vicissitudes and variations, there seems to have emerged in both these concepts, more distinct and more potent at every stage of their evolution, one common character, which is today dominant and decisive as a criterion of democracy and social work alike. Institutions are democratic in spirit if they rest upon the recognition of the inherent dignity and worth of individual personality; they are democratic in form if they provide the mechanisms by which the individual can develop and express himself in the affairs of the common life. The control and manipulation of social relations become social work when they are primarily directed to the promotion of individual selfdevelopment and self-realization through the opening of opportunities and the development of incentives for the fullest personal growth and the largest social contribution of every member of society.

If we have rightly described these concepts, it is obvious that there can be no inherent incompatibility between them. Their goals are identical; their processes must be mutually consistent. Democracy is at the heart of social work; social work, in some respects, is an instrument for the realization of democracy. Both imply that social values must be measured in terms of individual personality.

The problem stated for discussion, Where in social work is the concept of democracy applicable? might easily be resolved into the deeper and wider question, Where in social life is the democratic principle workable? For the problem