been its quality of sticking close to facts and rejecting all philosophizing and theorizing which did not fit the realities of life and answer the test of practical usefulness. And it is only by his ability to apply what he has learned that the candidate's legal capacity will be shown. The mark of his lawyer-like quality will be his ability to discern the legal significance and legal possibilities of a new set of facts.

Now if the examination is to be a test of the candidate's understanding of fundamental principles and his power of legal reasoning, important qualities are demanded in the examiner. He cannot be expected to frame a searching examination into fundamental principles unless he knows a fundamental principle when he sees one; and his judgment of lawyer-like reasoning will not be valuable unless his own mental processes are of that description. A little reflection will show that, in the present state of our law, framing a proper Bar examination is a task which calls for qualities of a high order. This makes the selection of a competent Bar examiner a hard problem-I believe the hardest problem in our whole subject. We have heard so much of the qualifications of the candidate for admission-a less difficult matter that I want to invite your attention particularly to the other side of the question-the qualifications of the examiner.

It must be observed at the outset that the difficulty comes chiefly from the attempt to keep standards high. Any examiner can get along pretty well if the examination is made easy enough. But as you aim at higher standards and try really to separate the sheep from the goats, the difficulties of the task increase in geometrical ratio. The teacher of law has peculiar opportunities to judge its difficulty, because he has a similar duty, which weighs heavily on his soul, of constructing examinations and marking them. Comparison of his work and the Bar examiner's is suggestive.

The teacher's work in preparing an examination is a hard business. To make it severe enough without being too severe, searching without being unfair, requires great pains and much common sense. The teacher must work hard at this problem or

he is not doing his duty by his pupils. Yet his difficulties in preparing an examination are child's play when compared with the Bar examiner's. The law teacher has taught a particular subject for a year to the student. His law may be good law, or it may be bad law. It may be plain straight-away law, or it may be fantastic law. It may have the accent in the right place, or it may have it in the wrong place. But at least it is a coherent and articulate body of law-he could not have stood up before the questions of his students for a year if it were not that. The teacher has his own views as to structure and relative importance, and any proper student can separate the essential from the unessential and understand all the law which that teacher teaches. The question What are the fundamental principles? thus solves itself; pro hac vice they are the principles the teacher has taught.

A simple illustration will show how different is the position of the Bar examiner. Time was when an educated man could read everything. Suppose in those days there had been an examination in general culture, to establish the candidate's status as an educated man. The examiner would have had only the task, comparable with the law teacher's, of selecting with fairness and good judgment from a field familiar to both examiner and candidate. But suppose you had to frame such an examination today, when the most learned can know but a small part of the world's learning, how would you decide between the conflicting claims of different subjects, to say nothing of endless questions of taste and scope and proportion arising within each subject? Such an examination would be an absurdity in any but the most competent hands.

The analogy to an examination in law is not so strained. When it was an examination in Blackstone or even an examination in Kent the examiner's problem was relatively simple. But now we have a body of law of which no man can know the whole, or even, quantitatively speaking, a large part. The complexity and extent of the law of a community depends of course on the richness and variety of its life; and it is hard to bring home to ourselves the prodigious growth of our law within a few

decades. And the capacity for separating the significant from the unimportant-of discriminating those parts of our statute and case law where exact knowledge is essential from those where it would be scarcely creditable-means broad knowledge and delicate judgment.

It is just here that the modern law school has a function which should not be overlooked or minimized. I do not mean to belittle the practitioner, and I know how superior the practitioner is to the teacher in some points. I recognize, too, how much of a real lawyer's training must be gained in practice-the issue between the old-fashioned views and those that now prevail is only whether the school of practice is a beginner's school or a finishing school. But with all proper allowances, I submit that the practitioner who has not a sympathetic understanding of modern law-school instruction cannot be expected to possess the broad point of view and the legal sense of proportion which our special problem requires. From the day a man begins his practice, especially practice in a large city, he finds himself drawn constantly into certain special kinds of work, and before he has been at the Bar ten years, no matter how general his practice, there are many great fields of the law of which his knowledge, if he ever had any, has disappeared or become atrophied. And naturally the things he is handling assume to him an undue importance and his sense of proportion suffers accordingly. Moreover within his own field his constant activity, if he is a good lawyer, is putting the microscope to each of his cases and knowing everything about them that can be known, everything of those facts and the law so far as it applies to those facts. But that last qualification, the limitation to those facts, has an important significance. Those facts probably raise a very narrow pointa point in the strict mathematical sense of the word, without breadth or thickness-in its relation to the law as a whole. The very thing he is not called on to consider is the general body of the law, the relation of part to part, its structure, its symmetry or lack of symmetry-the law, in short, and its general relations, as a science. Of course he may study those matters, but if he

does it will be an avocation, and he is likely to choose his avocations as far away as possible from his office-in art or music or biology rather than jurisprudence.

With a teacher of law the situation is just the opposite, and the difference is one likely to bewilder a teacher who comes fresh to teaching after years of practice. He finds himself at cross-purposes with his students, each failing quite to understand the language of the other, and each seeming to the other to have his emphasis distorted and to waste time on "fine points." What the student brands as a "fine point" is the lawyer's thorough analysis of the facts. These do not much interest him. He looks on facts in a rather superficial and uninterested way, and this is natural enough, for the school of practice alone can teach him how to handle facts, or reveal the magic and fascination of their unfolding. And so getting to the heart of a case in a workmanlike way may merely bore a good student. But his handling of a principle of law is a very different thing. Here he is instantly

alive, and his zeal and the uncompromising quality of his logic breed the "fine points" which the teacher would fain temper with judgment—that characteristic product of maturity. What the student wants is to know all about the subject in hand. He wishes to trace each principle to its logical result, and he is merciless to inconsistency. He delights in long reaches of thought, and he is bent upon symmetry, whether it is historically or practically attainable or not. To the teacher is denied the refuge, so grateful to his brethren on the Bench and at the Bar, of confining himself to the facts in hand and eschewing dicta. The dicta, and all the paths into which they lead, are just what the students are seeking, and rightly. As a result the teacher is constantly driven to think of his subject as a whole, to consider the relations of its parts with one another, and to determine questions of structure and proportion. These, together with proper methods of investigation and reasoning, are the very things which he aims most to give his students, in order that, when the time comes in after years for them to forget all the detail, they may still have such a grasp on fundamental prin

ciples, and right habits of thought may be so fixed in them, that they will be able to find the landmarks, and will never be straying in an uncharted country.

It is such considerations as this which justify the belief that a Bar examiner needs an understanding of modern scientific legal instruction in order to do his work aright. It is a work, too, that makes a sharp demand upon his conscience, and that conscience should be a sensitive one. In discussions such as this we sometimes hear assertions that the young man is not treated properly by our system. Now if the young man is examined by a Bar examiner whose legal understanding is inferior to his own, if "the light shineth upon the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not," then he certainly is not treated properly. How far such injustice has been committed in the past is largely a matter of conjecture. The Bar examiner's misdeeds are generally as securely buried as the doctor's. But disquieting glimpses have sometimes been given by examiners who have had the intrepidity to publish their questions together with the officially correct answers. Herein the reader may see wonderful things, suggesting a sum total of possible injustice not agreeable to contemplate.

It is a satisfaction, on the other hand, to reflect that in some states the work is excellently done. This is certainly true in Massachusetts, where the board has shown how much may be accomplished by conscientious and painstaking co-operation. The members consult together at each step, and thus supplement and balance one another. Their work has been systematized in so interesting a way that I hope the Chairman, if he is present, will give some detailed account of their methods to this meeting.

Do not understand me as asking any favors for the law schools. They ask no favors, and, if they are good schools, they need not ask them. A proper law school should keep the standard for its degree so much higher than it is possible, as a practical matter, for the Bar examiners to keep the standard for admission to the Bar, that its graduates should find themselves in no difficulty. Do not understand me as suggesting that teachers in law schools