Legal education in the United States generally refers to a graduate degree, the completion of which makes a graduate eligible to sit for an examination for a license to practice as a lawyer. Around 60 percent of those who complete a Juris Doctor degree typically practice law, with the remainder primarily working in business (especially finance, insurance, real estate, and consulting) or government or policy roles, where their degrees also confer advantages.
History
The first law schools in Europe The foundations of the first universities in Europe were the glossators of the 11th century, which were schools of law.Catholic Encyclopedia The first European university, that of Bologna, was founded as a school of law by four famous legal scholars in the 12th century who were students of the glossator school in that city. The first academic title of doctor applied to scholars of law. The University of Bologna served as the model for other law schools of the medieval age. Although it was common for students of law to visit and study at schools in other countries, such was not the case with England because of the English rejection of Roman Law. Although Oxford did teach canonical law, its importance was always superior to civil law in that institution.
Early legal education in England In England in 1292, when Edward I first requested that lawyers be trained, law students merely sat in the courts and observed. Over time, the students would hire professionals to lecture them in their residences. This practice led to the institution of the Inns of Court system.Stein, Ralph Michael, The Path of Legal Education from Edward to Langdell: A History of Insular Reaction, Pace University School of Law Faculty Publications, 1981, 57 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 429 (1981) The original method of education at the Inns of Court was a mix of moot court-like practice and lecture, and observation of court proceedings. By the 17th century, the Inns obtained a status as a kind of university akin to Oxford and Cambridge, though very specialized in purpose. With the frequent absence of parties to suits during the Crusades, the importance of the lawyer's role grew tremendously, and the demand for lawyers grew. The apprenticeship program for solicitors emerged, structured and governed by the same rules as the apprenticeship programs for the trades Oxford and Cambridge did not see common law as worthy of study, and included coursework in law only in the context of canon and civil law, and for the purpose of the study of philosophy or history only. These universities, therefore, did not train lawyers. Professional training in England was unlike that of continental Europe, where the law was viewed as an academic discipline. Legal educators in England stressed practical training.Moline, Brian J., Early American Legal Education , 42 Washburn Law Journal 775 (2003).
The training of solicitors by apprenticeship was formally established by an act of parliament in 1729. William Blackstone became the first lecturer of law at Oxford in 1753. The university did not establish the program for the purpose of professional study, and the lectures were very philosophical and theoretical in nature. Blackstone insisted that the study of law should be university based, where concentration on foundational principles can be had, instead of concentration on detail and procedure obtained through apprenticeship and the Inns of Court.
The Inns of Court continued but became less effective. No significant educational activity or examination was required for bar admission. In 1846, the Parliament examined the education and training of prospective barristers and found the system to be inferior to the legal education provided in Europe and the United States. Therefore, formal schools of law were called for, but not finally established until later in the century. Even then, the bar did not consider a university degree in admission decisions.
Legal education in the North American colonies and the United States Initially there was much resistance to lawyers in colonial North America because of the role they played in hierarchical England. Slowly the colonial governments started using the services of professionals trained in the Inns of Court, and by the end of the Revolution there was a functional bar in each state. As institutions for training developed in the colonies, because of the distrust of a profession only open to the elite in England, the institutions which developed in what would become the United States would be much different from those in England.
Initially in the United States, the legal professionals were trained and imported from England. A formal apprenticeship or clerkship program was established first in New York in 1730—at that time a seven-year clerkship was required, and in 1756 a four-year college degree was required in addition to five years of clerking and an examination. Later the requirements were reduced to require only two years of college education. A system like the Inns did not develop, however, and a college education was not required in England until the 19th century, so the American system was unique.
The clerkship program required much individual study. The mentoring lawyer was expected to carefully select materials for study and to guide the clerk in his study of the law to ensure that the material was being absorbed. The student was supposed to compile his notes of his reading of the law into a "commonplace book", which he would endeavor to memorize. Although those were the ideals, in reality the clerks were often overworked and rarely were able to study the law individually as expected. They were often employed to tedious tasks, such as making handwritten copies of documents. Finding sufficient legal texts was also a seriously debilitating issue, and there was no standardization in the books assigned to the clerk trainees because they were assigned by their mentor, whose opinion of the law may have differed greatly from his peers. One famous attorney in the United States, William Livingston, stated in 1745 in a New York newspaper that the clerkship program was severely flawed, and that most mentors "have no manner of concern for their clerk's future welfare… [T]is a monstrous absurdity to suppose, that the law is to be learnt by a perpetual copying of precedents." There were some few mentors that were dedicated to the service, and because of their rarity, they became so sought after that the first law schools evolved from the offices of some of these attorneys who took on many clerks and began to spend more time training than practicing law.
It was seen over the years that the apprenticeship program was not adequate for producing lawyers capable of serving their clients.Sonsteng, John O., "A Legal Education Renaissance: A Practical Approach for the Twenty-First Century" . William Mitchell Law Review, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2007 (Revised April 2, 2008). The apprenticeship programs often employed the trainee with menial tasks, and while they were well trained in the day-to-day operations of a law office, they were generally unprepared practitioners or legal reasoners. The establishment of formal faculties of law in U.S. universities did not occur until the latter part of the 18th century. The first law degree granted by a U.S. university was a Bachelor of Law in 1793 by the College of William & Mary, which was abbreviated L.B.; Harvard University was the first university to use the LL.B. abbreviation in the United States.Marion R. Kirkwood and William B. Owens, A Brief History of the Stanford Law School, 1893-1946 , Stanford University School of Law.
The first university law programs in the United States included much theoretical and philosophical study, including works such as the Bible, Cicero, Seneca, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Montesquieu and Grotius. It has been said that the early university law schools of the early 19th century seemed to be preparing students for careers as statesmen rather than as lawyers. At the LL.B. programs in the early 1900s at Stanford University and Yale continued to include "cultural study," which consisted of courses in languages, mathematics and economics.
In the 1850s there were many proprietary schools which originated from a practitioner taking on multiple apprentices and establishing a school and which provided a practical legal education, as opposed to the one offered in the universities which offered an education in the theory, history and philosophy of law. The universities assumed that the acquisition of skills would happen in practice, while the proprietary schools concentrated on the practical skills during education.
In part to compete with the small professional law schools, there began a great change in U.S. university legal education. For a short time beginning in 1826 Yale began to offer a complete "practitioners' course" which lasted two years and included practical courses, such as pleading drafting. U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story started the spirit of change in legal education at Harvard when, as a lecturer there in the early 19th century, he advocated a more "scientific study" of the law. Therefore, at Harvard the education was much of a trade school type of approach to legal education, contrary to the more liberal arts education advocated by Blackstone at Oxford and Jefferson at William and Mary. Nonetheless there continued to be debate among educators over whether legal education should be more vocational, as at the private law schools, or through a rigorous scientific method, such as that developed by Story and Langdell.For detailed discussions of the development of Langdell's method, see LaPiana, William P., Logic and Experience: The Origin of Modern American Legal Education , Oxford University Press (New York, 1994); and Stein, Ralph Michael, The Path of Legal Education from Edward to Langdell: A History of Insular Reaction, Pace University School of Law Faculty Publications, 1981, 57 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 429 (1981); pages 449-450. In the words of Dorsey Ellis, "Langdell viewed law as a science and the law library as the laboratory, with the cases providing the basis for learning those 'principles or doctrines' of which 'law, considered as a science, consists.'"Dorsey D. Ellis, Jr., Legal Education: A Perspective on the Last 130 Years of American Legal Training, 6 Wash. U.J.L. & Pol'y 157, 166 (2001). Judge James Kent, Francis Hilliard, son of Boston publisher William Hilliard, and Silas Jones, author of An Introduction to Legal ScienceGoogle Books website Retrieved 5 March 2025. attempted to emphasize a scientific approach.Schweber, Howard. “The ‘Science’ of Legal Science: The Model of the Natural Sciences in Nineteenth-Century American Legal Education.” Law and History Review, vol. 17, no. 3, 1999, pp. 421-422. JSTOR website Retrieved 5 Mar. 2025. Nonetheless, into the year 1900 most states did not require a university education (although an apprenticeship was often required) and most practitioners had not attended any law school or college.
Therefore, the modern legal education system in the U.S. is a combination of teaching law as a science and a practical skill, implementing elements such as clinical training,SpearIt. “Drafting Legal Documents in a Doctrinal Class,” in Experiential Education in the Law School Curriculum (Carolina Academic Press 2017). which has become an essential part of legal education in the U.S. and in the J.D. program of study. Whereas in the 18th and 19th century, few U.S. lawyers trained in an apprenticeship "achieved a level of competence necessary to adequately serve their clients," today as a result of the development of the U.S. legal education system, "law graduates perceive themselves to be prepared upon graduation" for the practice of law.
Faculty
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