Law: Harvard Four

In the late autumn of 1886, four Harvard law students who believed that the Law School had "a message for the professional world" met to map strategy for a new venture: a law review. Suggested by a young graduate of Ohio's Oberlin College named John Jay McKelvey, the idea was elaborated by his fellow students Joseph Henry Beale, Julian William Mack and John Henry Wigmore. During the Christmas recess young Mr. McKelvey went to Manhattan and sold his idea to the late great Joseph Hodges Choate, one of the foremost U. S. lawyers of the day, who became the magazine's first subscriber.

With John McKelvey as editor-in-chief, the 54-page Vol. 1, No. 1 of the Harvard Law Review appeared in April 1887. Bound with the same drab olive paper which has been used ever since, the first issue featured an article by Harvard's James Barr Ames on Purchase for Value Without Notice, went to 300 subscribers. Just as Harvard's late great Christopher Columbus Langdell's methods of case study became the guide for all U. S. law schools,*the Harvard Law Review quickly became the prototype for law reviews. The Columbia Law Times appeared in October 1887, and since then there have been 48 others. Average circulation of the reviews: 1,414—the largest (Harvard's) 4,400, the smallest 375—with students accounting for 18% of the total. Some Harvard Law Review editors who have made good: Louis Dembitz Brandeis, retiring SEChairman James McCauley Landis, Morgan Partner Seymour Parker Gilbert, Harvard's Felix Frankfurter.

Contributors to the April 1937 issue of the Harvard Law Review, which last week inaugurated the second half-century of the journal's existence, included four members of the first editorial staff. Joseph Henry Beale, now 75, longtime Harvard professor of law, surveys the conflicts of law during the last 50 years. Dean Emeritus of Northwestern University's Law School, John Henry Wigmore, 75, lightly recalls his early assignment to develop the Recent Cases and Notes departments. His prize Note, he says, was this quotation of Henry Lord Brougham in an 1846 British Parliamentary report on legal education:

"I won't say it's a humbug [i.e., legal education], but it's something very like it. . . . Latin questions were proposed after the lecture to the students. . . . But all we had to do was, if the question commenced with 'Nonne,' we said 'Etiam': and if with 'An,' we replied 'Non.' " Winks Northwestern's Wigmore: "But—oh, hum! Now that legal education in the U. S. A. has been delatinized, of course, the current generation of completely cultivated young jurists cannot appreciate [this]."

Manhattan Lawyer McKelvey, now 74, reviews the first 50 years of law reviews. [To the charge that law reviews are "stupid, dry, uninteresting . . . unleavened with humor," he answers: "Who would be likely to resort to a legal periodical for his humor? Certainly not a lawyer or judge. . . . The law review . . . [is] the vehicle of thought between legal scholars and the practitioners and judges."