Law School Asks Five Million to Halt Country-Wide Wave of Lawlessness

Dean Roscoe Pound, L. '90, has sounded the opening gun of the campaign which beings today for $5,000,000 for the development of the Law School. The University, taking note of the national feeling of dissatisfaction with the existing country-wide lawlessness, has proposed the establishment of five research professorships. The men chosen for these chairs will conduct a thorough inquiry into the whole field of American Law.

An endowment of $1,000,000 is asked for the founding of these chairs and the remaining $4,000,000 will be divided between the improvement of existing buildings and bibliography and the further endowment of existing professorships and new fellowships. The budget calls for the extension and completion of Langdell Hall, the work to cost $1,250,000, and the construction of an administration building on the site of Gannett House, and a building to contain an auditorium and rooms for moot arguments, perhaps north of the extension of Langdell Hall.

Only Minimum Requirements Set

Presenting the record of its past the Law School goes before the country with the proposal that the work of the past shall be continued and made even more valuable in the future. The needs of the Law School are even greater than the demands of the present campaign would indicate, but the minimum required has been asked for. If the school is to carry on according to the calibre of its past achievements it must have these funds, and the country, if it is to see a solution of its present legal tangle, must be provided with the findings of some such research. This is the form of the appeal which Dean Pound has made to public-spirited citizens.

The funds to be requested do not contemplate provision for a larger school. What is contemplated is adequate physical provision for the present number of students, but above all else an increased number of professors and greatly increased facilities for teaching and research.

Excerpts from Dean Pound's statement follow: "What research has done for the prevention and cure of disease, what it has done for engineering, and what it has done for the technical arts, it may well do for the law. The call for research in law is especially strong. Lawyers, courts, legislatures, the administration of justice in general, and the administration of criminal justice in particular, are subjects of serious crit- icism on the part of the lay public. The strain upon law due to the changes in modern life, and the resulting delays, uncertainties and miscarriages demand a service from legal scholars in national law schools that can be performed by no one else.

Criminal Law is Weakest Link

"One subject in which research is needed is criminal law, admittedly the weakest point in our polity. No subject of research affords greater possibilities. But the administration of criminal justice is involved, in part at least, in a wider problem of enforcement of law, in which research is urgently called for. One side of law enforcement has become of especial importance to the country, namely, application of law by administrative boards and commissions.

"If a generation ago it could be said with some truth that we were a judge-ridden people, it may be said with more truth today that we are a commission-ridden people. The characteristic institutions of our inherited common law are affected profoundly by the revival of personal government which goes along with this era of administrative commissions.

"In particular, the common-law doctrine of drawing principles from the judicial experience of the past to decide the controversies of the present is threatened by administrative methods which treat all questions concretely as particular questions, not as illustrations of some general principle; which regard administrative action as a unique series of independent acts.

Law School Not Merely Trains Lawyers

"Bar associations are accomplishing much. But they can do no more than organize the efforts of practising lawyers, and are subject to the same limitations. Nor can judges do much for us. The dockets of courts are too heavy. The view of the problems of justice which any court may get is too fragmentary, and its experience is too specialized or too local to make it possible for courts to do for our time the sort of thing they did so well in the formative era of American legal institutions.

"American law schools can render a real service, not merely to the profession, but to the economic and business interests of the country, and to every citizen by carrying on the scientific investigation on which the law reforms of the future must go forward.

"Harvard Law School is not merely an institution to train practising lawyers. It has long been an institution for the advancement of justice according to law through training those who will have to do with the administration of justice in such a way as to make their work effective for justice, not merely a means of livelihood....

Believes in Social Control by Reason

"As a national law school, and a school of the common law, the Harvard Law School believes in social control through reason, not through arbitrary flats of the sovereign will. It believes in law as the scientific application of reason to the problems of the legal order, not in rules of law resting upon the authority of its sovereign. It seeks to find this reason, and the means and modes of applying it, through study of the experience of English-speaking peoples in administering justice. It takes it for a postulate of civilized society that every one, in or out of authority, rules and acts subject to God and the law.

American Institutions Depend on Law

"To teach the experience of English-speaking peoples in the administration of justice scientifically and sympathetically is one of the surest ways of perpetuating American institutions, of dispelling plausible political crudities, and of insuring a sane and orderly legal and political development. The proper functioning of our political institutions presupposes the orderly maintenance of right by the state.

"Economic institutions, economic progress and material prosperity presuppose the legal ordering of conduct whereby division of labor and specialized activity become possible. Public order is as fundamental for our economic structure as is public health. Behind one quite as much as the other there must be continuous scientific research. The proposed plans for the development of the Harvard Law School have been worked out, and will be carried out, in the hope that in the future it may be able not merely to train lawyers, but to make a fundamental contribution to the upholding and development of justice through American institutions."

Reading Rooms Need Doubling

At present the reading rooms have a capacity of 506 for a school of 1200 students. Moreover, out of this total, 50 students are accommodated in a temporary reading room in a place designed for library stacks. The permanent reading rooms are for 450 only. In 1890 with 285 students there were reading-room accommodations for 296. In 1906, when Langdell Hall was planned, with 727 students, reading-room accommodations were planned for 698 students and provided for 506. Obviously the student of today is not provided for as he should be.

An ideal arrangement would provide reading-room capacity equal to allowing the whole student body to be in the reading rooms at one time. So it was from the building of Austin Hall down to 1891-1892. So it was in Dean Ames's plan of Langdell Hall. At the very least there ought to be room for half of the student body at any one time, and plans should be made for reading-room space for all students. Work in the reading rooms is an essential part of the system. Unless all students are able to have continuous access to the reports, encyclopedias, digests, and text books, and learn for themselves how to use a lawyer's tools, much of what it is sought to achieve is left undone. Additional reading-room accomodations for 750 students should be provided.

There are now 17 professors, two assistant professors, and three instructors, all giving their full time to the school. For these 22 fulltime teachers there are available 16 office rooms, 12 in Langdell Hall and four in Austin Hall, and 18 stack cubicles, 13 in Langdell Hall and five in Austin Hall. Not only do they lack office rooms for all teachers, but the necessity of providing for graduate students has largely crowded the teachers out of the stack cubicles. There ought to be an office convenient to the ilbrary stacks and a stack cubicle for each teacher, in addition to provision of stack cubicles for graduate students, research fellows and others engaged in research. Assuming a school of 1,500, with the same curriculum as at present, a total of 24 professors and assistant professors will be required. Thus at the very least we should have 24 professors' offices and 60 stack cubicles.

Need More Fellowships

At present there is the Thayer Teaching Fellowship with a stipend of $1200, and a temporary research fellowship guaranteed for five years by friends of the school. There ought to be in all ten such fellowships. Experience has shown that at least four of the best men out of each of the graduating classes, may be counted upon, at least two first-class men each year from recent graduates of other law schools, and upon at least four teachers of law coming to us from the outside. There is no reason to doubt that first rate men could be expected to take advantage of these positions. It is significant that this year, with only one graduate fellowship available, four men of the highest rank in the school, Law Review men, have suggested a willingness to take such a position.

There can be no question of the importance of the work these men might do if it were possible to make proper provision for them. Brought into close contact with the professors who are doing research work in important fields of law, not only will they stimulate the work of those professors but what the latter do will be made more effective practically through the research fellows going back each year to the institutions from which they have come, or going into teaching work in different institutions throughout the country, and thus aiding to diffuse rapidly throughout the country the best and latest results of modern science of law