exerted by standardizing agencies. Only two States (Kansas and Ohio) have attempted to regulate part-time law schools in anything like the manner recommended. The few other States that require a preliminary education of two college years (always subject to the demoralizing "equivalent ") do not require four years of study in an evening law school. The few other States which insist upon applicants remaining in an evening law school this long do not demand two years of college. The moral pressure of the standardizing agencies is the only influence at work. This has resulted in increasing the number of part-time or mixed law schools which comply, at least nominally, with the new standard requirements of preliminary education and length of course from one institution in the year when these standards were adopted, 1921-22, to 13 in the year 1925-26. Application of the other two standards affecting the library and the faculty has reduced to 6 the number of such schools that in the autumn of 1925 were officially indorsed either by the Association of American Law Schools or by the Council on Legal Education. Even this small increase was to only a slight extent at the expense of an inferior type of education. During the same four years the number of part-time or mixed schools which do not even pretend to comply with the time standards has decreased indeed, but only from 80 to 78. In several cases where admission requirements have been so strengthened as to exclude a considerable number of applicants these have been promptly taken care of by the organization of a new school in the same city.

The total number of part-time and mixed schools (excluding, for convenience of computation, those offering a law course of less than three years), and the attendance at these schools, have varied recently as follows:

Part-time and mixed law schools offering a law course of at least three years [Compared with other types of law school]

In interpreting these figures showing a progressive increase, both actual and proportionate, in part-time or mixed instruction, it should be borne in mind not only that the figures for "other"

schools include those offering a two-year degree course during evening or late afternoon hours, but also that professional law courses not leading to a professional degree do not appear anywhere in the table. In the autumn of 1925 seven part-time short-course degree schools and at least nine evening schools which did not as yet confer the degree were in active operation.

THE INFLUENCE OF PART-TIME INSTRUCTION UPON THE ORGANIZATION OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION

Whether or not one more or less standardized type of part-time law school will eventually drive all others from the field, the present régime of competition between part-time and full-time institutions, as recruiting agencies for the legal profession, has many unfortunate consequences. The most obvious are (1) the flooding of the bar by students whose training must in the nature of things be inferior to the none too adequate preparation provided even by the best of the orthodox full-time schools and (2) the hesitancy on the part of some of these schools to raise their present standards, lest the principal effect of such action should be to drive students away from themselves into inferior institutions. Although it is too soon yet to profit by the full lesson of experience in this respect, there is already some evidence that the current standardizing movement is producing this precise result.

There are several reasons why this situation does not excite more apprehension than it does. One is a distinct tendency on the part of well-trained lawyers-a tendency probably grounded in the very merits of their training and subsequent professional career-to take life and its evils unemotionally. Another explanation is that, while this element has been attending chiefly to its own business, numerous graduates of part-time law schools have become established in positions of influence in the profession, on the bench, and in legislative halls. Some of these gentlemen have actually remedied the defects of their early training. Doubtless all of them think that they have done so. With that loyalty to their own past that most of us possess, they close their eyes to any changes that may have occurred in the law or in the conditions of legal practice since they prepared themselves for the bar. Modestly disclaiming any exceptional force or ability in their own characters, they take the position that a course of preparation which was good enough for them ought to be good enough for anybody. They are particularly apt to oppose reforms which they suspect, often with some justice, are dictated by a fundamental lack of sympathy with part-time education.

Perhaps the most important influence, however, that is at work perpetuating an inherently indefensible system is a naive faith in

the efficacy of final bar examinations to stem the torrent. Lawyers of every description, and to an even greater extent the public at large, conceive of the flood of ill-trained applicants as breaking, so to speak, at the gates of the bar. These gates are manned by examiners who are supposed to have power both to exclude untrained applicants from the profession, and in so doing to put an end to any type of preparation whose products do not measure up to requisite standards. Even the bar examiners themselves sometimes seem to believe that the only real evil in the present situation lies in the fact that they are obliged to read too many hopelessly bad examination papers.

As a matter of fact, exclusion of the hopelessly incompetent is all that can be accomplished under the present system. Any attempt to subject applicants to really rigorous bar-examination tests falls afoul of the different methods of preparation that are necessarily pursued in the two types of law schools. The full-time schools usually avail themselves of the opportunity they enjoy to instruct their students by the valuable but time-taking Langdell case method. The part-time schools, because of the relatively small amount of time that their students can spare for study outside the classroom, can use the method, if at all, only in a form so modified as to rob it of much of the effectiveness which it possesses when pursued under appropriate conditions. Such schools are apt to attempt to make up for their deficiencies in this respect by greater emphasis upon what their rivals slightingly refer to as detailed "information" with regard to local law and practice. Both types of schools exert pressure upon the bar examiners-pressure that must be regarded as justified so long as the law permits both types to exist and to attract students. So evenly balanced is this institutional pressure that as experience has shown repeatedly-examiners can not prudently discriminate, in their questions or in their system of marking, against either type. Yet it ought to be obvious that a bar examination that is not keyed to a particular course of study or instruction simply can not be made an effective test of competency to practice law. No one has expressed this truth better than the inventor of the case method, Christopher Langdell. Nearly 50 years ago, combating an early disposition on the part of Suffolk County bar examiners to reject his Harvard law graduates, Langdell attacked the entire system of examination, "without reference to any particular course of study or instruction," in a passage concluding with the following words:

It is impossible that such examinations should be at once rigorous and just. They must admit the undeserving or reject the deserving, and in the long run they will be sure to do the former,

In a word, so far from our being able to rely upon bar examiners to insure that the products of our various types of legal instruction measure up to a common standard of competency, a powerful influence is exerted in the reverse direction. The fact that several dissimilar types of law schools compete with one another, as agencies for recruiting the legal profession, possesses, in addition to the unfortunate consequences which lie upon the surface, this additional one: Institutional rivalry demoralizes the bar examinations. It diminishes the likelihood that even for any particular type will there be a desirable safeguard on the industry of the students and the informed conscientiousness of their teachers.

It is for this reason that the problem of the part-time law school is not merely perplexing in itself, but is of fundamental importance in its relation to the future development of legal education in any sort of school. The part-time institution, so long as it is constrained to be nothing more than a poor copy of the full-time model, is a much more subversive influence than the law office. This latter has no powerful friends to fight its battles for it. Bar examiners can therefore hold its products up to any standard, even to an inappropriate one. In sparsely populated sections of the country this antiquated avenue of preparation can still be justified. In urban centers law offices already develop into evening law schools speedily enough. It is a question whether it is worth while to expedite a natural transformation by the adoption of a bar-admission rule definitely refusing credit for time spent in an office.

The first step toward a proper solution of the problem would seem to be to abandon the pretense that evening law schools and good fulltime schools can be made mutually equivalent, either in the amount of time that students devote to their education, or in the precise educational benefits they derive. It would be much better to formulate, as an objective, that of making part-time schools as good in their way as the best full-time schools now are in theirs. The graduate of a part-time school can not be expected to have received as large an amount of training, measured simply by its aggregate quantity, as the graduate of an equally good full-time institution. This does not mean, however, that the training may not have been as profitable, in its different way, nor even that the curriculum may not include valuable elements which the other educational type, in the pursuit of its objectives, is obliged to exclude. The authorities of our leading orthodox law schools, who are doing so much to improve our law, already realize how seriously its present condition strains their teaching facilities. Until the law that has to be taught is simpler than for many years even they can make it, they know how far they must continue to fall short of turning out ade

quately trained general practitioners. To contend, under these circumstances, that part-time law schools should be tolerated only to the extent that they are cheapened editions of their own schools, is to ascribe extraordinary virtue to a diluted case method. It would be wiser to cooperate with the many earnest graduates of all types of law schools who are now teaching law during the evening and late afternoon, in an endeavor to answer the following question: What methods and what curriculum are actually best adapted to part-time conditions?

An inquiry prosecuted in this spirit should go far to produce the type of part-time law school that the situation demands-not an institution which everybody, even its own faculty and student body, realizes is a makeshift, an inferior imitation of a really good school, but something that stands preeminent in its own educational field, at once gives its own students benefits that they could secure nowhere else, and frees the full-time law school from some of the responsibilities under which this type of institution now staggers. An attitude of this sort would probably find expression among other developments in an alternative system of bar-admission examinations. One set of questions, intended for full-time law students, could not be answered satisfactorily by anyone else; another set of questions would be of such a nature that only well-prepared applicants from part-time schools could pass the examination. In the course of years this might or might not result in a clearly defined division of the legal profession along functional lines. Should this development occur, it would mean not merely that the profession had split under economic pressure into two fairly distinct divisions, recruited respectively by the activities of full-time and of part-time schools. This it has already begun to do to-day. It would mean that, instead of attempting by a process of artificial standardization to arrest what philosophers have long recognized to be a mark of social progressa tendency to proceed from uniformity to diversity-legal reformers had regularized this tendency and turned it to good account. It would not mean that the legal profession was weakened because of not being formally united to the extent that physicians and surgeons, general medical practitioners and consulting specialists and research workers, are united in a single profession to-day. The practice of the law includes a much greater variety of occupations than those in which graduates of medical schools engage. American lawyers find a closer analogy, not in the relatively restricted medical profession, but in a broadly inclusive "health service," which group comprises practitioners of all the many healing arts. If the argument by analogy is to be invoked, it is as unreasonable to standardize the education and the professional affiliations of every