method was a "fetish," thereby running the risk of being themselves dubbed "old fogies." INADEQUATE BAR ADMISSION REQUIREMENTS The lack of harmony between legal practitioners and schoolmen, and the further divisions within the ranks both of organized bar associations and of law schools, militated against any rapid advance of standards in at least two ways. First, and most obviously, in contrast with the powerful educational machine headed by the Council on Medical Education and supported by the great majority both of practicing physicians and of medical schools, different groups of reformers in the disorganized legal profession each cherished separate ends. Instead of traveling together upon a broad highway of progress, each regarded the other's avenue of reform as at best an unimportant by-path-too often as one that led in a positively wrong direction. If they united upon anything, it was in their tendency to ascribe to practitioners at large a cynical apathy, for which the feebleness and confusing variety of their own leadership was primarily to blame. In the second place, and more concretely, it was impossible under these conditions to build up an adequate system of bar admission requirements. In medical education, however much remained to be done in the way of toning up the licensing system, its general principles and its objectives were clear. Already the great majority of States positively required applicants for admission to medical practice to have graduated from a medical school. The State boards of medical examiners were designed to supplement this system and to fortify the dominant type of sound medical education. In the case of a good school their examinations constituted a precaution, additional to the tests provided by the school's own faculty, against failure on the part of individual students to take advantage of their opportunities. They constituted an even more important weapon of defense against low-grade medical schools. The boards had it in their power to improve or even to destroy such schools by failing to pass their graduates or even by denying to their graduates the right to take the examination. Even in 1910 it was probably broadly true that good graduates of good medical schools had little anxiety as to their ability to pass the medical licensing tests; and although the existence of medical sects complicated the task of weeding out inferior schools, the united profession has been successful in achieving the following ends: Schools that profess to be orthodox have been assisted to maintain proper standards; if products of an unorthodox type of medical education can often secure permission to practice the healing art, at least they are usually prevented from holding themselves out as "regular" physicians. By contrast, in the legal profession no single State required applicants for admission to practice to have graduated from or even to have attended a law school. And in the case of applicants who attended law schools not the slightest distinction was made, either in professional or in popular usage, between "regular" lawyers and others. Products of the case-method law school, of the textbook or dogmatic law school, and of no law school at all, stood upon a footing of precise equality as regards both the process of admission and the legal privileges that would be thereby attained. The effect of this undiscriminating uniformity was at once to exaggerate the importance of the bar examination and-as will be shown later to destroy the conditions under which it can be used profitably to measure educational attainments. The examination could not be attached to a proper system of preparation as a useful supplement because no one knew what a proper system of education was. It had come, therefore, to occupy the position of an independent educational test; as such it was more seriously regarded both by students and by practitioners than the supplementary medical licensing examination. Having this factitious importance, it distracted attention from other devices that are much better calculated to promote competence and character among lawyers. Requirements of preliminary general education and of a specific period of law study were largely ignored because of deluded reliance upon an unsupported bar examination. DIVERSIFIED LAW SCHOOL REQUIREMENTS Another complication in legal education, from which medical education is relatively free, had its origin partly in the conditions above described and partly in the inherent difference between law and medicine. The time that students are required or expected to devote to their preparation is only one of many aspects of professional education. It is a highly important aspect, however, and because it lends itself to measurement by figures it has always been specially emphasized both by reformers and by fact-collecting agencies. The diversity in this respect among law schools in 1910 was far greater than that among the medical schools and imposed a correspondingly heavier burden upon those who wished not necessarily to improve, but even to understand, legal education. Three elements are involved in any attempt to estimate the time that a student devotes to his professional preparation. Of these, the first and most obvious is the duration of his course in the professional school. In this respect the medical course had already become definitely standardized at its present figure of four academic years, and the path was cleared for a movement to add a supplementary clinical year. In 1910 every medical school conducted, at least ostensibly, either a complete four-year course or the first half of such a course, designed to be completed in another school. In legal education, however, the orthodox period was only three years, and it was not until as recently as 1905 that the Association of American Law Schools had required its members to comply even with this standard. No less than 40 law schools outside of the association, or nearly one-third of the total, still announced courses of two years, or even of a single year, leading to a law degree. The situation resembled that which had existed in medical education immediately after the Civil War, before the inauguration of their modern era of standardization. A second element of equal importance is the time that a student devotes to his studies while in the school. Year for year, a school which holds its sessions during the regular working hours of the day, for the benefit of students who are not engaged in any outside occupation, is, of course, in a position to demand much more than an evening school run for the benefit of self-supporting students. Just how great the difference is can hardly be expressed in precise mathematical terms. It is possible, however, to state with precision the number of medical schools which operated under this very substantial handicap. The number in 1910 was only 4 out of a total of 140.2 Very different was the situation in law. As truly here as in medicine, institutions that held their sessions during the evening or during the late afternoon operated under a serious handicap as regards their maximum possibility of accomplishment, year by year. On the other hand, an argument of some cogency can be made that it is of the utmost importance that students of modest means shall not be denied access to the politically privileged bar, and that the only practicable avenue of preparation for the overwhelming majority of such persons is the evening or part-time law school. Whether this argument, which is based upon a recognition of the peculiarly intimate connection between law and politics, is or is not sound, is a question which will be discussed later. The point of immediate interest is that, whether sound or not, it provides a basis for the part-time law school that is lacking in the part-time medical school. Incidentally, artificial light does not impair the efficiency of instruction in law as much as it does in a subject where laboratory work in the natural sciences is required. Again, the amount of capital needed to equip something that can pass muster as a "school" is vastly smaller in law than in medicine; a considerable 2 For the figures relating to medical education which are used in this paper the writer is indebted to Dr. N. P. Colwell, secretary of the Council on Medical Education, who has also kindly read the manuscript prior to publication. section of the public is ready to believe that a few chairs, a few books, and a printed announcement convert an attorney's office into an educational institution. These differences between the nature of medicine and of law explain why schools which appeal particularly to self-supporting students are so much more numerous in the field of legal education. Under bar admission rules which give credit for study either in a law office or in a law school, offices develop into "schools" so insensibly that the precise number of these latter can never, in the nature of things, be ascertained. If the count be confined, however, to institutions sufficiently pretentious to confer a law degree, we find that in 1910 no fewer than 60 out of 124 law schools, or almost onehalf, were either purely part-time institutions or were "mixed" schools holding sessions for independent divisions of full-time and of part-time students. The third element that must be taken into account in estimating the time that law-school graduates devote to their preparation is the admission requirement of the school-that part of the student's total preparation which he secures before he begins the study of law proper. Here there was less difference between the two professions. Of the 136 full-time medical schools the great majority-112, or 82 per cent had an entrance requirement, at this date, of a high-school education or less: Of the remainder, 8 required one college year prior to the four-year medical course, a total of five years after the high school; and 16 required at least two college years, a total of at least six years after the high school. Corresponding to these were 43 full-time, three-year law schools, of which again the great majority-31, or 72 per cent-had an entrance requirement of a high-school education or less, while 4 required one year, 3 required two years, and 5 required at least three years of college. Except that the law course was one year shorter than the medical course, this particular group of law schools conformed fairly closely to the full-time medical schools as regards the time that students devoted to their preparation. In both groups there was a feeling that the time had arrived for increasing entrance requirements among the schools generally to the level already attained by some. This common ideal was reinforced by the circumstance that it was in the larger universities that the schools with the highest entrance requirements were usually found. To this extent medical schools and law schools resembled one another in 1910 both in their actual condition and in their aims. 3 Six universities-Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Wisconsin, Stanford, and the University of California-announced, in 1910, an entrance requirement of two college years, or over, for both medical and law departments. No independent medical school or independent law school required any college work, and many had no entrance requirement at all, at least in actual administration. No attempt has been made to distinguish between these cases and a genuine high-school requirement. But only to this extent. For whereas the 136 full-time, fouryear medical schools included, as has already been pointed out, vir tually all the medical schools then in existence, the 43 corresponding law schools constituted only one-third of the total. The following table attempts to make clear how many features besides entrance requirements had to be considered if the nation-wide standardization of medical schools was to be duplicated in legal education. The numerals with asterisks include all medical schools and all law schools that from the point of view of the medical standardizers could already be regarded as "orthodox," on the ground that students were expected to devote to their studies their entire time during a period of four years in medicine and of three years in law. Such schools are shown to be divided into groups that required periods of three years, of four years, of five years, and of six years to elapse between the date when the student leaves the high school and the date when he secures his professional degree. Finally, the number of schools that departed from orthodoxy, as regards either the duration of their professional course or the time of day at which their class-room sessions were held, is indicated by the figures without asterisks. There are 10 such categories, comprising a total of 81 law schools, as compared with one similar medical category comprising 4 medical schools in all. If sweet simplicity and standardized uniformity are indispensable elements in human institutions, in 1910 an Augean stable awaited the legal reformer. Medical schools and law schools classified according to the time required, after completion of the high school, to obtain the degree, 1909–10 Four years: Four years in medicine, after high-school education or less. * 112 *In these schools the students devote to their studies their entire time during four years in medicine or three in law, |