to this end. Just as the student of the Saxon Chronicle, of Chaucer, Wycliffe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, King James' Version of the Bible, Milton, Addison, Pope, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, will acquire a competent knowledge of the origin, growth, strength and richness of the English language, so will the student of the Saxon Dooms, the laws of Alfred the Great and of Edward the Confessor, of Glanville, Bracton, Littleton, Coke, Hale and Blackstone, learn to appreciate, and, appreciating, to revere the manliness, the freedom, the vitality, the power, the majesty and the basic sufficiency of the Common Law.

THE BAR EXAMINATION-ITS PROPER TIME AND

LENGTH.

BY

EDWIN C. GODDARD,

OF ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN.

In our day and country the Bar Examiner is the St. Peter of the legal heaven. He to whom the legal St. Peter openeth not must go below and live without the legal brotherhood. It was not always so. Not so long ago the admission gate (or bar) was kept by any member of the Bench. This meant it was not kept at all, for no one was denied admission, and there is still at least one of the states of our union where every voter of the state of good moral character has the constitutional right to admission as a member of the Bar. Until very recently it was in all our states assumed, practically if not actually, that no preliminary legal training should be required. Every man had the right to advertise himself to his fellows as an attorney and counselor, leaving them to try him out and determine whether he should earn his living by lawyer's fees. The cost to his clients of these experiments by which he learned his profession and determined whether he could live by it seems not to have been considered. Time was when the physician learned his trade (shall I call it so?) in the same practical way. But long ago people refused longer to have life thus experimented upon. Now no man may be admitted to the medical profession who has not had a prescribed training in the schools. It is no longer a trade, but a profession. Strangely enough, men who value their property almost as life itself, require the trained doctor, dentist and pharmacist, but are unconcerned about the preparation of the lawyer to whom they intrust their dearest property interests.

However, the great advance in training required for admission to the medical profession has been due in the main to the interest and activity of the profession itself and not to that of the people at large. In the same way the advance being made in requirements for legal training is the result of agitation by members of

the Bar, especially through the bar associations and notably this section of the American Bar Association. This is in part, at least, due to the fact that the lawyer, more clearly than other men, sees how much of the criticism of Bar and Bench is due to the fact that there are so many unworthy and ill-equipped men allowed to offer their legal services to the public. This results in bungling, narrow-minded, technical lawyers, and what is more serious even, in such a number of them that the struggle for existence leads to questionable, dishonest and even criminal practices, and lowers the whole tone and ethics of the profession. In taking steps to cure this condition we have lagged far behind our medical brethren, and this notwithstanding the fact that the legislatures that must prescribe the remedies are largely made up of lawyers who should be alive to the need. This has, perhaps, been one reason for the lagging. In the past many of those legislators have been lawyers admitted to the Bar without any law-school training, and naturally enough they have been slow to show interest in changing the conditions under which they came to the Bar. It seemed like putting a brand of inferiority on their own credentials. When it is considered how many of the profession today, including not a few of its most eminent members, never were enrolled in a law school, it is, perhaps, to be wondered at that they have been as alert as they have in moving for a change. There are still protestants who urge that present-day requirements would have barred Lincoln from admission. But the answer to this is plain. They would have done no such thing. On the contrary, present conditions would have made it possible with no great trouble for Lincoln to have secured adequate training before he began practice, and who can doubt he would have done it? Scores and hundreds of men similarly circumstanced are doing it, to their great advantage and to the still greater advantage of the profession and the public. And yet it is still true, so far as I know, that not a single state of this union requires legal training in the schools as a preliminary to the Bar examination, though in all the states where the Bar examinations mean anything the practical result of present requirements has been to send to the law schools a very large percentage of those seeking admission to the Bar. Curiously enough some Bar examining boards even now frame the language of their certificates of legal

study on the old condition of study in an office under a practitioner, and law schools in certifying their students to the examining boards have to modify the language of the official forms, so slowly do we adapt ourselves to the changing order.

But it is not my purpose to enlarge upon what has been so often. and so much better stated and urged in meetings of this Section, viz., that every man coming to the Bar should first have at least three years of training in the law school. I may call attention to the Standard Rules for Admission to the Bar proposed by this Section, and especially to the forthcoming report of the Committee on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar to which these proposed rules were one year ago referred by the American Bar Association. Action upon this report may be expected during the present week. Without giving statistical tables or further argument, it serves the purpose of this paper to remark that today nearly all the states have some real requirement for admission to the Bar, most of them have some sort of Board of Bar Examiners, and most of those boards give a real written test to determine the legal fitness of candidates, who have first filed certificates showing real legal study for two or three years, and in a large number of the states most of these candidates have had this study in law schools. Let us hope the day is immediately at hand when our legislatures will require preliminary legal training in the schools, and refuse to accept the confessedly inadequate office study. Certainly it is now true that candidates for admission are coming largely by way of the schools. Assuming that the Bar examination is set largely for candidates preparing in the law schools, what should be its time? Manifestly it should have some relation to the time when candidates are completing their work in the schools. What should that relation be? A natural and easy plan, followed in some states, is to take the examination to the principal law school in the state and hold an examination at the close of the school. More often it is held at the state capital, but at the time of or even before the close of work in the law schools, usually very early in June. The law schools of the state are almost compelled to close with reference to this date, and candidates from schools outside the state are left to arrange as they can. Not infrequently the date of the Bar examination is the same as that of the final examination in many of the law schools. Manifestly

students cannot be in attendance upon both examinations, and the Bar examinations will not yield. Often they are in this way penalized for not attending a home law school. This is surely one way to encourage home industry. It tends to make the law schools local, limiting their students to residents of the state, and naturally tending to make the instruction local, based on the peculiar law of the state. The limits of this paper do not permit a discussion of the effect of this, but the writer believes it to be pernicious, in narrowing both the contact of students and the breadth of their training. They have at best three years in the law school for broad training in the great principles of the law. They have all of their later professional lives to devote to the local law. Law schools with a cosmopolitan membership must, others very well may, largely limit instruction in law peculiar to the state in which the school is located. Bar examinations usually overdo attention to local law.

Not all the Bar examinations are held so early in June. Some are set for late June or early July, and in some states the examination does not come till September. It is the purpose of this paper to urge that the last is the best date.

What should be the primary consideration in fixing the time for examinations? Manifestly not the temporary convenience of the candidate. That is a secondary consideration, to be given weight only as may be consistent with the permanent good. The primary consideration is to so set the examination for admission to the Bar as to insure the best test of that preparation by the examining board. An examination immediately at the close of the law school not merely seriously handicaps men preparing in law schools closing at a date later than the Bar examination, but it also seriously interferes with the work of the last term of the student in every law school. With our rapidly expanding law the schools have had to abandon the attempt in a three-year course to teach the student all even of the important subjects of the law. Some schools are offering a four-year curriculum; one has announced a four-year requirement for graduation. It is believed all will agree that a full three years of legal study in a law school is hardly adequate to a thorough preparation for the practice of the law. The Bar examination should not curtail or interfere with this. But what is the effect of setting the Bar examination at