Harvard, Yale Law: Academic Parallel

ABOVE the entrance to the Sterling Law Buildings at Yale, there are two panels of bas relief. One shows a medieval classroom with the professor asleep; the other pictures an ancient courtroom with the judge asleep.

Outside the Graduate Center at Harvard Law School stands the modern, metallic "World Tree."

Some would claim that Yale's figures show a sense of humor and a relaxed approach to the law, while Harvard's "Tree" is cold and forbidding. Others might say that the medieval scenes at Yale indicate Yale is living in the past, and that Harvard is the school not only of the present, but of the future.

The case of Harvard v. Yale is not that simple. For both schools have had great pasts, and most agree that they will have great futures. Prominent Yale Law graduates include Herbert Brownell, and Estes Kefauver.

Harvard has also contributed men to present-day public-life--men like David Lilienthal, Dean Acheson, and the late Robert T. Taft.

Academic revolution

Academically, times have changed at the two schools. Several years ago, it may have been appropriate to say that. "Harvard teaches what the law is. and Yale teaches what the law should be." Today that would be as outdated as to shout "Keep Cool with Coolidge" in an election campaign. The schools necessarily teach basic legal traditions, and both also teach that law is a living and developing institution. Harvard, by introducing the case study method, and Yale, by beginning the so-called "policy approach to the law," achieved revolutions in legal education.

Both have, in a sense, begun to study each other's case books. For the legal contents at Harvard once was bare of anything that might set law in its economic and social contexts. Law was viewed as something static--the lawyer was a mere technician who had to discover a prescribed set of rules known as the law. The case study method, developed by Dean Langdell in 1870, was central to Harvard's study of law, and most law schools throughout the country have since adopted it. Studying decisions of the past helped the lawyer or judge to find the correct decision in the present.

Or that is what the legal world thought until Yale undertook the second revolution in the teaching of law. Under former Dean Hutchins and Professors Thurman Arnold and William O. Douglas, the "policy approach" was introduced in the 1920's and 1930's. Law became an instrument which the judge could adapt to certain philosophical or social ends. These men felt that it was insufficient to study cases only, without knowing the judge's own philosophical values. Thus Yale law students studied past legal decisions, but they also consciously strove to develop their own set of values, which were as important as legal precedents. "What should the judge have done?" was the constant question around Yale halls.

Social orientation

Yale still offers courses oriented to the "policy approach." Professor Harold Lasswell, for instance, a social scientist on the Law faculty, with Professor Myers McDougal, gives a course in "World Community and Law," which presents international law "in the perspective of the world-power process." Philosopher-lawyer Filmer Northrop teaches "Philosophy of Natural Science and Natural Law." Professor Fowler Harper, too, in his course on "Family Law," considers not only such things as divorce law, but also the psychological and personality conflicts that lead to divorce. As he says, "We want to go behind the law to find what makes people commit adultery."

Certain professors at Yale disapprove of such a sociological view of law, however. As Professor James Moore says about the policy approach, "I think the damn thing's a myth. I don't want to be fussing around with sociology and psychiatry when I'm talking about federal jurisdiction." Of course, he recognizes that certain fields of law, such as anti-trust, probably demand a more functional approach, because there are "lots of questions that have never been settled."

The new dean of Yale Law School, Harry Shulman, Harvard Law LL.B. '26 and S.J.D. '27, probably comes nearest to the truth about the differences between Harvard and Yale approaches to law when he says, "There is as much difference within each faculty as there is between the two. Not all of our professors teach by any one method." He emphasizes the value of studying law in its context in life, for law "is not an autonomous body of doctrines and principles." And yet, he says, this policy approach, if mishandled, "becomes superficial. A professor can pass off for knowledge what is really ignorance in another field. It can become sloppy."

Dean Shulman, as a piece of stolen goods from Harvard, will probably restore to Yale a sense of balance, for he is well known as a labor arbitrator for such companies as Ford. He also teaches his own course in Labor Law. The 51-year-old dean was born in Russia, was brought to the United States in 1912, and became a U.S. citizen in 1921.

Yale students, of course, have realized the limits to the policy approach before the advent of the new dean. Despite the elective system, in which all courses are elective after the first year, only a handful of students take many of the more radical policy courses. In preparation for bar examinations and for future practice of the law, most see that the standard courses in Torts, Contracts, and so forth, are safer and perhaps more valuable.

If Yale Law has in a sense retreated from its advanced position on the legal battlefield, Harvard has discarded some of its nineteenth century armor for modern, imaginative weapons--weapons resembling Yale's former revolutionary doctrines. Dean Erwin Griswold jokingly says, "Yale talks about it; we do it." As he told the entering class in 1954, law "has deep roots in the past. It presents a continuity of development which must be understood if the law of the present is to be mastered. But it also has a flexibility, a capability for growth and development, which is as much a part of the law as its past." He continued: "You are studying not to be lawyers, but to be lawmakers as well."

Since Dean Griswold was appointed in 1946, basic changes have taken place in Harvard's approach to the law. There has been a complete revamping of the curriculum and the addition of many new and diverse seminars. The 50-year-old legal expert went to Oberlin College and received his LL.B. from Harvard Law in 1928 and his S.J.D. in 1929.

The school of world law at Harvard symbolizes the change in the Harvard approach. Problems in world organization, foreign investment, economic development, international trade, the European Coal and Steel Community--these demand a modern approach through international legal seminars.

Many professors in both law schools are active in outside work with private and public agencies. Professor Harold Lasswell, Yale's chief exponent of the policy approach, is now on a year's absence to work with a Ford Foundation project in California. And Professor Eugene Rostow, also at Yale, is working with Attorney General Brownell on an investigation of anti-trust legislation.

Harvard's projects

At Harvard, many research projects are in operation--many of them on a joint basis with other graduate schools. Surveys of Massachusetts administrative and judicial procedures have been completed, and Professor Sheldon Glueck is analysing some legal problems in juvenile delinquency. The Law School is also starting an advisory study for Israel's legal development. Another new project is an inquiry for the International Bank into the regulation of the electric industry in underdeveloped countries. These research projects at Harvard show a functional approach to law that would not be foreign to a Yale environment.

Harvard, then, although it does not offer the sociological courses that Yale does, has nevertheless come to realize that law is not only a rule but a policy, and that such projects as a broad study of world law are needed to maintain progress in legal study.

If the educational philosophies of the two law schools are now almost indistinguishable, the distinct difference in size leads to many contrasts in social atmosphere, student body, and classroom technique.

1,514 student were registered in the Harvard Law School last year, and only about 500 could live in the Graduate School dormitories. Of Yale's 499 students, however, almost all who wanted to live on campus could find room in the ivy-covered Sterling Law Buildings.

This living situation alone creates a unified student body at Yale and a more individalistic atmosphere at Harvard. In Cambridge, it is easy for a student to choose his friends from many associates, and if he prefers the quiet of a rooming house to study his torts and liabilities--even on the afternoon of a big football game--that is his privilege. There is no pressure at Harvard to socialize, to get a date; the only pressure is to keep a general average above 58--a failing score--and as near 75, or "A," as possible.

Closer society

At Yale, where students deny the presence of social "pressure," there is an easier, more intimate social atmosphere. Since the dorms, classrooms, library, and dining hall are all within one quadrangle, a student comes to know most of his class by the time he graduates. During the football season, when Harvard is content to throw a Saturday night dance at Harkness Commons, the Elis go about it in a big way. Two whole entries move out of their rooms, and dates move in at the cost of one dollar a room. If a student does not intend to socialize, he might just as well leave for the weekend. With the evicted men crowded into other rooms, it is next to impossible to study. As one Yale Law student said, "When you study here, you do it alone; but when you play, you let everyone know it."

Yale's librarian, obviously imbued with this spirit, serenades the students as they leave at closing time. "Taps" is followed by "Boola, Boolal" on a makeshift xylophone.

One of the most debated issues at Yale now is not something legal--but something illegal. This year a set of stringent parietal rules has gone into effect. Previously no one quite knew what the rules were, and rather than check with a dean, everyone simply forgot there was a curfew. This situation lasted until an indignant student complained to the dean that a policeman had broken up his five a.m. party. New rules, of course, resulted, prompting indignant letters to the Yale Daily News as well as a Law School "League of Reaction."

Extra-curricular balance

It is significant that while Yale fights restrictions on its social life, students at Harvard Law are being urged to leave the books for some extra-curricular activity. The Harvard Law Record, the school's newspaper, recently complained:

". . . There is the inevitable alarm clock in the morning, two or three classes to attend, and then the rest of the day and evening to deal with. For most, this means study, study, and more study. Dormitory life has tended to break the monotony to some degree by affording numerous opportunities for bull sessions and the like. But this underlying theme is still generally the same. This type of life has its virtues, but there can be too much of a good thing. . ."

Actually, both schools have excellent extra-curricular activities. In addition to honorary groups like Harvard's Law Review and Yale's Law Journal, the number of organizations open to students is large indeed. But while at Harvard every organization operates independently, Yale has a Law School Student Association to which all students belong. The group puts out the Yearbook and handles all social, dormitory, dining hall, and athletic programs. There are even a law school jazz band, a choral society, and an annual Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

Despite these activities, Yale is not the "backslapping" place it is often made out to be; nor is Harvard completely the coldly competitive school that Yale students condemn. There is, nonetheless, a difference in atmosphere which comes both from the difference in size of the student bodies and from the physical plants.

The more cosmopolitan nature of Harvard's student body also helps to produce the absence of group spirit. 303 colleges and 30 different nations were represented in last year's enrollment. Yale, one-third Harvard's size does well to attract its students from 152 colleges and 15 foreign countries. The myth about Yale's "policy approach" probably tends to appeal to a certain type of student--one interested in social, as well as legal, values. Harvard, it is claimed, is made to order for the individualist, the student who is interested in broadening his intellectual capacity through contact with a varied environments. Since Yale has somewhat de-emphasized its policy approach, however, and both schools offer loans or scholarships to about 23 percent of their total enrollments, the two student bodies are probably more alike now than formerly.

Grade pressure

Intellectual competition has been another standard comparison between Harvard and Yale. It was once claimed, with considerable truth, that Harvard flunked out a great number of students--sometimes nearly 30 percent of the first year class.

As a Harvard professor was supposed to have said on the first day of the first term: "Look to your right and look to your left: One of you won't be here next year." With the advent of Dean Griswold and a selective system of admissions, the high casualty rate has dropped to about 10 percent.

Yale, on the other hand, tried its best to separate the sheep from the goats before the first year, rather than after, It was not rare to have no failures take place over three years. Even now, as one student said, "It's pretty hard to flunk out of this place," although the actual number of failures varies from about five to ten in each class of about 150 over a three year period.

With pressure of final exams and numerical grades constantly before the Harvard student, he tends to look down on Yale's semi-annual marking system of "excellent-good-satisfactory-fail." For the Harvard student is convinced that he works harder than any other law student in the world.

If Harvard is more competitive after admission, Yale seems to have somewhat stiffer entrance standards. Harvard, which up to the post-13Yale's Sterling Law Quadrangle