lawyers of experts in other fields. The economist, the statistician, the physiologist and the psychiatrist must work hand in hand with the lawyer in helping to make the law of the future if that law is to be adapted to the needs of the future.

Numerous instances of such co-operative work are to be found in the investigations conducted by commissions appointed by legislatures for the study of industrial conditions and the devising of legislation to improve those conditions. Improvement in the law applying to commercial transactions has resulted from the work of several of the standing committees of this Association. Other private agencies such as the National Consumers' League, the National Child Labor Committee and the American Association for Labor Legislation have contributed much to the work of law reform.

With the exception of the committees of the Bar Association these various bodies have contained experts in other fields as well as lawyers. And our bar associations have as a rule confined their reforming energies to the realms of procedural and commercial law where the conditions to be dealt with are as familiar to lawyers as to others. They have given comparatively little consideration to the problems of industrial relations. Yet such relations affect the interests of a far greater proportion of our population than do the commercial dealings between business men. These omissions bear silent testimony to the incompleteness of the strictly professional outlook. Only to a moderate extent have our bar associations been interested in law as a cultural study. Only to a limited degree have lawyers been prone to question the desirability of the status quo. The searching inquiry characteristic of the scientific attitude has not deeply penetrated the professional mind. The initiative in law reform has come more largely from those most familiar with the conditions to which the law applies than from those most familiar with the law.

The work of the agencies referred to has been confined to that of investigation and recommendation. Still more significant is the endeavor to adjust the law to changing conditions by uniting in administrative commissions the functions of making investigations and of issuing orders which have the force of law. No longer is the task of lawmaking confined to courts and legis

latures. Administrative commissions are taking over field after field of legal regulation for the simple reason that they have superior equipment for becoming acquainted with the facts of life to which the law applies. Less learned in the law than the courts, less directly responsive to public opinion than the legislatures, they nevertheless are continually gaining in public esteem '. because they are better informed about the subject matters with which they have to deal than are either courts or legislatures. Many lawyers still regard them as excrescences on our legal system. But in spite of this their scope and their powers are increasing rather than diminishing.

These developments which are taking place in the world of action indicate clearly the steps to be taken in the realm of legal education if the study of the law is to be approached from the standpoint of culture as well as of professional training. We must superimpose on our professional schools some further agencies of education and research. We must gather together companies of men trained in many different but cognate fields to do co-operative work of legal research in the broadest sense of the term. These groups will seek to discover how our existing legal institutions actually work. They will do what the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology is doing. They will do what is being done by our bar associations, our legislative and administrative commissions, our private associations for legislative action of various kinds. They will be a clearing house for the activities of all existing agencies for the improvement of the law. They will present the results of their investigations in such form that they will be readily available for practitioners, for courts and legislatures and for administrative commissions. They will do for legal research what our medical schools and our private foundations are doing for medical research. They will frankly confess that their task is to make the world a better place for all to live in as the medical experts are trying to make the world a place where all will live longer. They will command respect because they know whereof they speak.

Such groups should be engaged in teaching as well as in research. The teaching will not be dogmatic. It will consist mainly in directing the research work of the advanced students who will come to co-operate with them, to acquire from them the

scientific attitude and the disciplined mind. Such students will become men with breadth of vision and depth of understanding. From them should be recruited our judges and our law teachers. Through the professional law teaching they will influence the mental outlook of our future practitioners and judges. They I will increase the cultural element in our professional training. They will bring home to us all that law is not a gospel to be revered and kept inviolate but is, like education and our other social agencies, a man-made instrument for advancing the culture of a people.

THE PENNSYLVANIA REQUIREMENTS, PAST AND PRESENT, AS TO GENERAL EDUCATION FOR ADMISSION TO THE BAR.

BY

CHARLES L. McKEEHAN,

OF PENNSYLVANIA.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is divided into 56 judicial districts, each with its separate Court or Courts of Common Pleas. We have two appellate courts, the Superior Court and the Supreme Court. It is an old, and until very recently, a settled principle in Pennsylvania that admission to the Bar is a judicial and not a legislative question and that every court in Pennsylvania shall regulate and control admission to its own Bar.

This principle has had a far-reaching and beneficent influence, in several respects, in molding the character, standards and professional relations of the Bar of Pennsylvania. We are here concerned with it only in so far as it has affected the question of admission to the Bar.

Any attempt to trace the requirements for admission in Pennsylvania would require, as you see, a statement of the rules of the courts of the several judicial districts and the Supreme Court from early colonial days to the present time. Such a review is beyond the limits of time allotted to this paper, nor would it be very useful for present-day purposes. So far as I have been able to discover, there were no requirements, in early days, as to general education as a prerequisite to the study of law. The Bars of the several judicial districts, and especially the Bar of Philadelphia, which was the most important Bar of the Commonwealth, were composed of a comparatively small group of lawyers, who knew, or knew of, most of the young men who applied for admission, and were acquainted with their antecedents and environments, their characters and general qualifications. Law examinations were conducted for the most part orally, but the examiners depended very largely upon the certificate of a member of our Bar that the young man had studied under his tutelage and was, in his opinion, qualified for admission.

That system served well in its day, and the learning, character and achievements of the generations of lawyers who were thus admitted, constitute a proud heritage of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. But conditions have mostly changed since then and it would be impossible and equally undesirable to attempt to review that system.

Some twenty years ago, when there was agitated in Pennsylvania the question of a uniform system of admission, through a State Board of Examiners, it was universally recognized that the principle so firmly announced by our Supreme Court that admission to the Bar is a judicial question, precluded the possibility of accomplishing the desired result through legislation. The suggestion was made and was finally adopted, that if the Supreme Court would appoint a board to conduct examinations for admission to the Bar of that court, and if that board were composed of men of sufficient standing in the profession to command the confidence of the Bench and Bar of the state, a uniform system and a raising of the standard might be secured through the voluntary acceptance by the Common Pleas Courts of the certificate of the Supreme Court's Board. And so, in the fall of 1902, the Supreme Court adopted a new set of rules regulating admission to its own Bar, and appointed a so-called "State Board of Law Examiners" to carry these rules into effect. These rules, of their own force, applied, then and now, solely to admission to the Bar of the Supreme Court. But within a short time, the Common Pleas Court adopted rules substituting the certificate of the State Board of Examiners for the examinations theretofore conducted by the local boards.

Thus we have had a uniform system for admission to the Bar in Pennsylvania for the last 15 years. It rests upon the voluntary acceptance by the Common Pleas Court of the State Board's recommendations. The lower courts still have the right to admit an applicant who has not qualified before the State Board, but this is exercised very rarely. So far as examinations are concerned, the system is practically uniform.

I should like to remark, in passing, that our State Board deals directly, only in a very limited and tentative way, with the question of the moral character of applicants for admission. That still rests with the local boards and no applicant is recommended