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years, he goes to the Supreme Court and states that he has done his duty and asks to be relieved and somebody else put on to do the work.

I do not pretend to offer any solution of this problem, gentlemen, but I felt that it might be worth while to suggest what I have.

Chairman Bates:

I am informed by the officers of the Section of Legal Education that all of their business is finished, and the same is also true of the business of the Association of American Law Schools; and therefore I suppose a motion to adjourn will be in order.

On motion, duly seconded, adjournment was made sine die. Walter W. Cook, Secretary.

ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT.

BY

HENRY M. BATES,

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR, MICH.

The all-pervading ferment of the period in which we live will inevitably affect the tendencies, the spirit, possibly the scope, of legal education. In the apparently unordered and agitated movements of perhaps the most fluid century which civilization has known, it is possible even now to discern the general direction in which irresistible social forces are trending. It requires no demonstration that these great social changes, which as yet we only partially understand, will inevitably produce corresponding changes in our law. Indeed the process is already well under way. It was no accident, no mere political cunning, that made our law and its administration the central and the dramatic issue of the last presidential campaign. Vast forces, beyond control of individuals or of parties, have made our legal system a problem and forced it upon the attention of the country.

In this state of affairs law teachers of today occupy a strategic position, and are fortunate, perhaps beyond any who have preceded them, in the possession of opportunity for conspicuous service in the cause of social justice. Certainly not since the time when Langdell and Ames proved that there is a science of juristic principles, and that law may best be taught, not as dogma or a trade, but as a science and a profession, have law teachers occupied a position of equal strategic strength for helping to direct social movements towards a more nearly perfect justice.

The development of the case system of instruction, with the consequences which have flowed from it, has proved to be very much more than a mere change in legal pedagogy, for this scientific study has resulted not only in the accurate and scholarly

restatement of much of our law in accordance with true juristic principles, but it has produced a generation of law teachers and thinkers capable of leading the way in one at least, and I believe in both of the great changes through which our jurisprudence seems destined to pass in the near future, a (1) change of emphasis from extreme individualism to a broader social policy through which individuals, all individuals may find greater protection as well as greater opportunity, and (2) a reduction of our whole body of law to a real system.

Not even the leaders of that great movement, the conception and early development of which we are all glad to recognize as the contribution of the Harvard Law School, worked in such close contact with epoch-marking changes in social structure, as is it possible for the law teachers of today to do. But responsibility and obligation follow opportunity with equal pace, and law schools and law teachers should set themselves zealously and thoughtfully to the accomplishment of the difficult tasks in the improvement of our law which circumstances and conditions. seem to call upon them especially to perform. The opportunity and the duty are ours. The Bar, whether because it is the victim of the inadequate legal education of the past, or because it is submerged in the commercialism of the age, or because of its traditional conservatism, or because of all these reasons, does not, with many exceptions, of course, fully appreciate the situation and seems powerless to do much, though the whole country is insisting that much be done to improve law and its administration.

Besides the passivity of the Bar, there are many reasons why leadership in legal reforms must be assumed by law teachers and many indications that the public is beginning to look to them for this purpose. The "cult of incompetence" associated with early stages of democracy is giving way to a belief in expertness, in specialization and in sound thinking. And so even the longsneered-at scholar and theorizer is coming into his own. The United States has had one President who, though most distinguished for public service, was for many years a successful teacher of law, and the country has applauded the sweet nature with

which, leaving his exalted political station, he has returned to law teaching, with serene confidence that he was not thereby affecting the dignity of our highest political office. He has been succeeded by one whose whole active life, until two years before, had been devoted to teaching public law and government. Governors, mayors and other high officers have recently been recruited from our ranks, but perhaps even more gratifying is the conspicuous fact that heavy drafts have been made upon the ranks of teachers for expert service in public matters of vital importance, such as tariff-making, insurance and other commercial investigations, and the drafting of legislation. Most welcome and significant too has been the growing tendency of state and local Bar Associations to invite law teachers to address them. The profound impression upon the Bar, and the entire country as well, made by the address of our colleague Pound at the American Bar Association meeting in 1906 would suggest that the program makers of that Association have overlooked golden opportunities since then. It is fortunate that the development of a class of professional law teachers and scholars during the last thirty or forty years has given to the country, at a time when its political, industrial and social institutions are in a period of unprecedented flux, a disinterested body of men of scientific legal training, with time and the other opportunities for investigation and mature reflection, free from the distractions, the restrictions and the mental refractions of active law business, who may take leading parts in the reformation of much of our law, a reformation made inevitable by the changes already alluded to.

Granted that the opportunity to render service in matters of fundamental importance to the state in a critical social period exists, how shall law school men avail themselves of it? How shall they proceed? Obviously an adequate answer to these questions can be given only after an analysis of the principal and persistent causes of dissatisfaction with our system of law and its administration, and a consideration of which of them are of such nature that they may be removed, and which of these our law schools and law teachers are best qualified to attack. That there is a relation between law schools and the characteristic features

of that system of law which obtains in their jurisdictions, so to speak, and that in that relationship the school is by no means exclusively the product or the creation of the "received tradition," but that it powerfully reacts upon the law, is recognized in Maitland's much-quoted saying that "law schools make tough law." If law schools may give permanency or at least persistence to a legal system, they ought also, in some measure, at least, to be able to give it other qualities, to guide or mould in some degree the life which persists. The toughness, as our friend Pound put it last year, may be made " that of living tissue, not that of dead fiber." May not law schools also have something to say as to the quality of that living tissue? This certainly is a possibility which was overlooked for centuries in the history of education in English law. The severe and rigid training of the Inns of Courts, which dominated legal education until the eighteenth century, was a species of intellectual gymnastics which produced remarkable dialectical skill and tended to a high degree of professional efficiency, but the function which was proposed for it and which it served almost exclusively was preparation for practice at the Bar, in precisely that scheme of law which then existed. Anachronistic procedure, " crabbed pedantries," out-worn legal fictions, substantive law which still smacked too much of the first substitutes for private revenge, were received and passed on to succeeding generations, with little or no comment or questioning. The training in the chambers of practitioners and the work under special pleaders, which succeeded to the education of the Inns of Courts, savored even more of mere apprenticeship and its limitations. The establishment of the Vinerian chair at Oxford in 1756 marked the beginning of academic instruction in English common law, but momentous in consequence as it was destined to be, this foundation and the brilliant contribution of the first occupant of the chair were but the seed, which even yet have not come to full fruition either in England or America, at least so far as actual conditions at the Bar or in existing law are concerned. The reasons for this long delay in liberalizing the education of English lawyers are too well known to the members of this Association to justify recital on this occasion.

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