The History of Legal Education
Most lawyers today would hardly recognize the legal system in America at the time of its founding. There were no big law firms. There weren't even law schools. Abraham Lincoln, one of America's most famous lawyers, only had about 18 months of formal schooling total in his life. Today, law school alone is almost twice as long, and usually comes after attainment of a four-year bachelor's degree. Not surprisingly, the law has adapted to meet the needs of an increasingly complex society. The legal profession has changed since Lincoln's day, and the history of legal education is largely an echo of those changes.
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English System
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Though the American legal system took its own direction in the 19th and 20th centuries, its roots are undeniably in that of the English system, primarily the common law. The earliest legal systems in England simply occurred when a king or noble held "court" to decide disputes within his territory. By about the year 1300, courts had become more formalized, and students were trained in how to appear before the various courts by attending them, discussing the cases presented and staging moot courts. It was during this time that a three-tiered hierarchy of progression appeared at the Inns of Court in London, though the duration of legal education was five years.
Colonial America
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In the early days of America, few trained legal professionals abandoned the security of British courts to sail for the distant colonies. In many colonies, the Bible was the primary source of law, and the clergy the dominant judicial authority. British common law was nominally in force, if not enforced, at least to the extent to which the colonists assented to its imposition. As larger cities, such as Boston and New York, developed, Britain increasingly sent trained English judges to oversee its interest in the colonies. Other lawyers began to arrive in America, and they took on young men as apprentices. These professionals would establish British common law in the colonies.
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Early Requirements
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Much of the history of the legal profession has been the regulation of education to maintain the prestige of industry. If education standards were too low, or too many lawyers accepted, the profession as a whole would suffer. In the late 18th century, the New York court system mandated four years of general education followed by five years clerking, passage of the bar exam and recommendation by six admitted attorneys. Control of the standards passed from the court system to the state bar, and these education and training requirements were significantly reduced. Clerking, which at this time referred to working as a sort of paralegal for an attorney rather than researching for a court, would remain the primary form of formal legal education for at least another century. The privileged trained in England at the Inns of Court before returning to the colonies to practice.
Post Revolution
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The legal profession faced serious challenges in the wake of the American Revolution. A residual animus towards all things British, including British common law, pervaded the new country. At the same time, the American legal system was no longer formally connected to the British system. Though the common law remained an important source of precedent, gradually the impetus to simplify the complex common law pleading system and adopt it to the more austere realities of American life took hold in the states. The first legal programs at American universities appeared in this period with lecture as the method of instruction. Separate law schools evolved out of the private practice of attorneys who began spending more time training their clerks than representing clients.
Harvard Law
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Large institutions were scarce on the expanding American frontier, but the need for law and order was not. Because the Midwest lacked centers of legal education, no license was required to appear before a justice of the peace, and after a few appearances, a license could be obtained. This was how an individual like Lincoln could aspire to the law without formal training. But, during the same era, great innovations were occurring at Harvard. It was at Harvard that the three-year term of law school was set, and this became the model for other schools. In 1869, Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell was chosen to lead the Harvard Law School. He was the first to develop and implement the casebook method of legal education, by which students traced out the formation of legal rules and principles by studying past cases.
American Bar Association
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Langdell's casebook approach was highly controversial when first introduced, but it has grown to become the dominant, almost exclusive way lawyers are trained today. At about the same time as Langdell introduced his first casebook, the American Bar Association (ABA) was founded in New York in 1878 by 100 lawyers from 21 states. Today, about half of all lawyers are members of the American Bar Association. Supporting the proliferation of Langdell's teaching approach, the ABA took up the challenge of maintaining legal standards in defense of the profession. In 1952, a council of the ABA was recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as the national agency for the accreditation of law school programs.
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