same thing, if you will take my word for it. Your license will enable me to get through in one year, and I promise not to practice until I have studied a year at the law school." This is a very fair proposition and the judge accepts it, and in a few days some law school has a member of the bar entered in its Senior class a member of the bar who has never read a page of law. The offer to members of the bar to become Senior students has, I am sure, been made by these schools in good faith and unconscious of the results, and I trust what I have said may lead to its modification.

We who are most interested in legal education are at present petitioning the legislature to restrict to the appellate courts the power of admission to the bar. A great advance in the standard. of admission would, we are assured, follow this change in the law. At present the greatest competitors and rivals of the law schools are the circuit courts. Many who choose the legal profession for their calling look upon it as a waste of time to spend even two years at a law school when the end they have in view-a license to practice-may be obtained without any expenditure of time, and very little expenditure of money. This door to the bar with its dubious standards once closed, we should see a large increase in the number of students in the law departments of our colleges and universities. The candidate for admission to the bar as between the appellate court examination and the stricter law school final examination would prefer to take the latter preceded as it is by a systematic course of instruction, where the former only follows the student's own reading in his own way with such help as he may receive from some friendly lawyer. My purpose in this paper is to avail myself of the opportunity presented to me to-day of calling attention to this unfortunate phase of the requirements for admission to the bar in my own and other States, and to ask that the voice of this Association (especially of those engaged in teaching the law) be enlisted in the endeavor which we are making at this time to raise the standard of legal education in the West by calling for the abolition of this power now vested

in the inferior courts-a power which I believe to be the greatest hindrance to any advance in the requirements for admission to the bar which exists to-day. I cannot but feel that it must be the conviction of all the members of this Section of the Association, and likewise of the practicing lawyers assembled here this week, that the jurisdiction to admit to the bar of any State should reside in the highest court of that State, where a right standard may be expected to obtain, and where the qualifications required may be uniform and known; and shall not be allowed to remain in the inferior courts whose methods cannot be always known, whose standards must and do vary, and whose execution of this important trust has been found to be wanting.

PAPER

READ BY

SIMEON E. BALDWIN,

OF NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT.

[BEFORE THE SECTION OF LEGAL EDUCATION.]

LAW SCHOOL LIBRARIES, AND HOW TO USE THEM.

Law may be learned, as a profession, with no other library than a few text-books, or with no library at all.

There has been no better way yet invented to teach philosophy than the Socratic one, and it would be an ideal training in the science of jurisprudence for a willing learner to get all he knew from a willing teacher, able and ready to make himself a speaking book.

But under our American system of reliance on judicial precedents, while the profession might be taught by word of mouth, it cannot be practiced to advantage, in any large way, without the power and the opportunity to consult books, and many books. In the larger States, and in the Courts of the United States, a careful study of digests, and generally of reported cases, is indispensable before any case of difficulty can properly be brought to the attention of the Court.

One great aim of legal education for America, then, must be to teach how best to handle such books, so as to get the most out of them, and to be able to present it in the most effective way. The scholar must learn to search out what he wants intelligently, quickly, accurately. He must learn where to go and when to go; what to look for, and how to read it. A book may be so read as to be worse than unread.

The way to do anything easily is to do it often. The way to know how to handle a book is to handle a great many.

The ideal law library, then, in this point of view-is the library where there is the freest access to the shelves. How much more can any man of literary taste make of his own library, small though it be, than of the largest public collection! He knows the faces, or the backs, of every volume. He knows their tone, their aim, their merits and their shortcomings with that sort of familiarity which comes only from close personal acquaintance. The very page on which this or that weighty sentence is to be found is fresh in his memory.

So far as the Law School library can be assimilated to one's own private library, in these respects, so much the better for every student. This is one of the main benefits to be derived from training in a lawyer's office. What books he has are fully at the command of his clerks and students.

Such was the ancient practice also at our Universities.

The happy inability to provide a sufficient force of librarians and librarians' assistants, on account of the expense it would involve, left students generally free to rummage the shelves for themselves, each pursuing his reading by an alcove table, heaped, if he cared for them, with twenty books, to be exchanged in ten minutes, perhaps, by his own hand, for twenty others.

The President of a great University, where growth of numbers had driven the authorities to the adoption of the stack system, and the doling out of books, one by one, through a hole in the wall, said to me not long since that, free as he was to go behind the railing, and read where he would, and as he would, the whole atmosphere and spirit of the place were so changed for him that he made much less use of the library than ever before, and it had lost for him a great part of its attraction and utility.

The member of a Law School Faculty who has access to shelves from which the students are debarred feels that he has almost an unfair advantage over them, and is in danger of expecting more from them than he will find.

The best part of education, Herbert Spencer has well said, is what we get without knowing it. The best hold of a legal

doctrine is often secured by a casual glance at some passage, met by accident while looking for something else, and which would never have been seen, had the student's search for what he was in pursuit of been directed and limited by the aid of a librarian.

The cardinal rule in library administration, then, I should say, is to give every student as free access to the shelves as is reasonably possible.

In law schools with less than a hundred students, I believe it is entirely practicable to give them such access without restriction. Such a school will naturally be divided into two or three classes, not over fifty of whom ordinarily can be studying the same subject at the same time. And of this possible fifty, half will make only occasional use of the library, and but eight or ten will be constant readers there.

Over numbers so small a single librarian can readily keep sufficient watch to see that the privileges they receive are not abused; nor will the same volume often be wanted by several, at the same moment.

Of certain books, several copies must, of course, be kept. Duplicates have an important place in every library of a public nature, but in none more so than in the law library. Our profession is not only explained, like other sciences, in books. For the American and the Englishman it is made by books. It is made up of or from the opinions of Judges in reported cases. Every such report fills to us the place of the specimen to the naturalist. But he may often meet a hundred specimens, in a summer's walk, each like the other in all important characteristics. We can turn to but one case for the introduction of this or that rule or doctrine into our law, or for its best statement or clearest application.

Hence, if we are teaching a class, we necessarily refer every one of them, at the same time, and in the same connection, to the same case or line of cases. We may do it directly, or, by the use of a text-book, citing certain authorities, indirectly.