The roots of American legal education go back to fourteenth century England and the Inns of Court established in London as academic residences where students heard lectures, participated in moot courts, read legal treatises, especially Blackstone’s Commentaries, attended court proceedings and apprenticed with experienced attorneys in the legal community.[1] Inns of Court did not exist in the American colonies. Private apprenticeships with practicing lawyers were the primary means of legal education and training. Aspiring lawyers “read law” in offices, copying pleadings and serving as “secretary, factotum and law clerk” for a period of years before taking an oral examination.[2] In New York admission to the bar prior to and following the Revolutionary War required either a college or university education followed by a three-year apprenticeship under a practicing attorney or a seven-year apprenticeship. The first law schools arose in response to a shortage of private apprenticeship opportunities following the Revolutionary War when many experienced lawyers took positions in newly independent state governments and large numbers of Tory or Royalist lawyers either returned to England or found themselves barred from practicing law in the newly independent states.[3]
The lack of apprenticeship opportunities led to the creation of law professorships at several colleges and universities. The first of these was established in 1779 by Thomas Jefferson at William and Mary College, with George Wythe, Jefferson’s own mentor, training many of the nation’s early lawyers, including future Chief Justice John Marshall In Connecticut in 1784, Tapping Reeve, who had trained his brother-in-law, Aaron Burr, began offering law courses in a building he constructed for that purpose in the town of Litchfield. This became the first independent, private law school in the nation.[4]
In New York, Peter Van Schaack’s Kinderhook Law School, founded in 1786, blended apprenticeship with lectures, offering one of the first organized alternatives to law office training. In 1793, Chancellor James Kent was appointed professor of law at Columbia College where he authored “Commentaries on American Law,” a mainstay of legal instruction for decades after he left teaching in 1798 to take the bench.[5] In 1837, two years after New York University School of Law was established, the New York State Supreme Court adopted a rule providing that “[a]ny portion of time not exceeding two years spent in regular attendance upon the law lectures in the University of New York” would count toward satisfying the apprenticeship requirement.[6] NYU Law School’s inaugural faculty consisted of William Allen Butler, Benjamin F. Butler, William Kent and David Graham, Jr.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw a steady shift toward formal law school instruction and away from the apprenticeship model. In New York, Albany Law School opened its doors in 1851, Columbia Law School in 1858, Cornell Law School and Buffalo Law School in 1887, New York Law School in 1891, Syracuse University College of Law in 1895 and Brooklyn Law School in 1901. The emergence of law schools was attributable to growing dissatisfaction with the apprenticeship model. Benjamin D. Silliman, a distinguished lawyer addressing the 1867 graduates of Columbia Law School observed:
As a general rule, it was impossible for the attorney in whose office the student was engaged to give any material attention to his studies, and his progress and attainments, therefore, lacked system, and were slow, confused, and uncertain. A formal and superficial examination at length passed him to the bar, and he could rarely feel at home in his profession until he had acquired, by subsequent laborious and anxious practice, a knowledge of very much that he should have attained at the outset. He was thus obliged, at great disadvantage, to lay a part of the foundation of his house after he had toiled long upon the superstructure.[7]
The period following adoption of New York’s Constitution of 1846 brought an influx of unprepared newcomers.[8] Reflecting the democratic, anti-elitist attitudes of the Jacksonian era, the 1846 Constitution erected low barriers of entry to the legal profession. Article VI, section 8 provided that “any male citizen of the age of twenty-one years, of good moral character, and who possesses the requisite qualifications of learning and ability is entitled to admission to practice in all the courts of this state.”[9]
New York’s minimal bar admission requirements made a career in the law “an attractive route for men on their way up in the world,”[10] including many unscrupulous men whose actions seriously tarnished the reputation of the bench and bar. In 1870, Samuel J. Tilden, a bar leader and founder of the New York City Bar Association, pointed to recent instances of unethical conduct by lawyers and judges that had degraded the status of the legal profession in the public eye.
It cannot be doubted—we can none of us can shut our eyes to the fact—that there has been, in the last quarter of a century, a serious decline in the character, in the training, in the education, and in the morality of our bar, and the first work for this association to do is to elevate the profession to a higher and a better standard. If the bar is to become merely a method of making money, making it in the most convenient way possible, but making it at all hazards, then the bar is degraded. If the bar is to be merely an institution that seeks to win causes, and to win them by back-door access to the judiciary, then the bar is not only degraded but it is corrupt.[11]
Following its formation, the City Bar played a leading role in the investigation and subsequent impeachment of the corrupt Tweed Ring judges. Its pioneering efforts at self-regulation and professionalization elevated the competence and integrity of the bar over time. The City Bar model was soon replicated at the state and national levels with the formation of the New York State Bar Association in 1876) and the American Bar Association in 1878.
The professionalization of the bar was further advanced by the state legislature’s delegation of authority to the Court of Appeals to promulgate rules and standards for admission to the bar, including educational requirements and proof of good character.[12] In 1895, the legislature authorized the Court of Appeals to appoint a State Board of Law Examiners for the purpose of developing and administering a uniform bar exam to all candidates seeking admission to the bar.[13]
By the late 1890s the growth of organized bar associations and law schools across the state together with court regulation had produced “a more perfect system and method of instruction,” and bar admission standards that were “far in advance of most of her sister states.”[14]
By the early 1900s law schools had become the primary conduit for entry to the legal profession while also providing new opportunities for professional advancement among women and minorities. In 1870, for example, James Campbell Matthews became the state’s first Black law school graduate. The Albany Law alum would go on to become the state’s first Black judge in 1896.[15] NYU Law School was among the first law schools in the nation to admit women in 1890. Stanleyetta Titus was the first female law graduate admitted to the New York bar in 1893, and Anna Jones Robinson was the first woman of color admitted to the New York bar in 1922.[16]
[1] Mark T. Flahive, “The Origins of the American Law School,” American Bar Association Journal, Vol. 64, No. 12, Dec. 1978, at 1869.
[2] Id.
[3] Henry Wyans Jessup, “Legal Education in New York,” History of the Bench and Bar of New York Vol. I, New York History Co., 1897, at 178.
[4] Paul DeForest Hicks, “Litchfield Law School,” Judicial Notice, Iss. 16, 2001, 4-11.
[5] Jessup at 181-82.
[6] Id. at 182.
[7] Id. at 181.
[8] Deborah S. Gardner & Christine G. McKay, Of Practical Benefit: New York State Bar Association 1876-2001, New York St. Bar Assn., 2003, at 6.
[9] New York State Constitution of 1846, Art. VI, Sec. 8.
[10] Deborah S. Gardner & Christine G. McKay, Of Practical Benefit: New York State Bar Association 1876-2001, New York St. Bar Assn., 2003, at 6.
[11] Wheeler H. Peckham, “The Association of the Bar,” History of the Bench and Bar of New York Vol. I, New York History Co., 1897, at 196.
[12] Judiciary Law sec. 53; see also Gardner & McKay at 21.
[13] L. 1895, Ch. 946.
[14] Id. at 188.
[15] The History of Albany Law School | Albany Law School. see also “A Negro Democrat,” New York Times, Oct. 29, 1895.
[16] About the BWLC | NYU School of Law. Kate Stoneman was the first woman admitted to the New York State Bar in 1886, but she was not a law school graduate at that time.