Law Schools: Harvard at 150

There is something special about the mind of a good lawyer—he does not think as others do. He will not accept easy generalizations nor climb quickly to a conclusion. He prefers, like a mountaineer intent upon a peak, to take the more careful, circuitous route so that he can be surer of his ground. He loves the facts, detests disarray and imprecision, and spends his working hours trying to define life within a framework of the law. He is not born this way; it takes a law school to turn the necessary bent of mind. And for thousands of hopeful lawyers, the pre-eminent place to be trained is, and has always been, Harvard Law School.

The 546 who are lucky enough to be the first-year men of 1967 (out of 3,250 applicants) have every reason to expect that they are in for a rich educational experience. Under Dean Erwin Griswold, Harvard Law School is celebrating its 150th anniversary, and the sum of what it has accomplished in those years is indeed impressive. Its faculty is regarded by many as the finest in the U.S. More than 40,000 lawyers have studied there, including such men as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter. Among today's leaders, the school has produced Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, Yale President Kingman Brewster and Sociologist David Riesman. The quality is matched by quantity. Harvard Law has prepared fully one-fourth of all U.S. law professors, and its 21,000 living graduates constitute one-sixth of the lawyers in the country.

"It's Discriminatory." Such a record would have been hard to predict back in the fall of 1817, when the school was founded with six students and one professor. In fact, as late as 1870, the Boston law firm of Ropes & Gray was saying that Harvard Law was "almost a disgrace to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts." That year, however, things changed. Christopher Langdell became dean, and he brought with him the case method—the innovative inspiration that has been the cornerstone of legal education ever since. He viewed the law as a science, with a series of progressively dependent rules. These rules were based on the precedent of cases, he observed, and they could be learned only by dissecting those cases.

The dissection become a pitilessly reasoned undertaking. The aim was to recast the collegian's thought process almost as radically as military basic training recasts the civilian's. Sensibilities were not spared. "Sir, that may be logical, but it's not ethical," said a student to renowned Professor Joseph Beale. Replied Beale coldly: "Sir, I suggest that you transfer to the divinity school." That pre-World War II exchange is not much different from the give-and-take in today's Harvard Law lecture rooms. "Mr. Marcuss, what is constitutionally objectionable about this ordinance?" Professor Frank Michelman asked recently. "It's discriminatory, sir," said Marcuss. "Discriminatory," boomed Michelman. "Can you name one regulatory act that is not discriminatory? Is it not the very nature of regulation to discriminate?"