the members of the bar did so, there would be a greater chance of our ceasing to indulge in platitudes and working together and really doing something to maintain and improve the standards of legal education.

ADDRESS OF CHARLES K. BURDICK

(Professor of Law, Cornell University)

MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: Your Committee on Legal Education last year, at almost the outset of its report, made this statement, to which I want to call your attention: "Our first conclusion, and one in which we have found no disagreement on the part of those with whom we have consulted, is that there are annually admitted to the bar in this state large numbers of men who are unfitted for its responsibilities either by training or education, and who are without natural or acquired inclinations to uphold its traditions."

The education of a lawyer naturally falls into two stages -the pre-legal education and the actual study of the law. You may all have very strong opinions as to what the law school should teach. You have heard something with regard to the law-school teaching from Professor Scott. I am not going to talk on that subject in the few minutes which are allotted to me. But I want to speak about the other part of the education of the lawyer; namely, the pre-legal education.

At the present time in this country, there are about half a dozen schools which require for entrance a bachelor's degree, or at least whose requirements are such that practically all their students have such degrees. There are besides these schools between twenty-five and thirty which require two years of college for entrance. Then there are a dozen or fifteen which require one year of college, while all the rest of the one hundred and fifty or more schools in this country require only a high-school education or less. Besides that, a more startling fact is

that there is not a state in the Union that requires more than a high-school education for the men who are starting to study law, and many of them require much less. Now, the question is: Is that a satisfactory condition?

Let us look at it first from the point of view of the man who is approaching the study of the law. A student who comes to the law school directly from high school is intellectually immature. Certainly it is true in this country that high schools do not fully develop the mental capacity of the student. The result is, and this has been found from experience, that if a man comes directly from the high school, he finds, for instance, great difficulty in dealing with such a technical subject as real property, and this being so, he certainly cannot envisage the big problems of constitutional law, public service or corporations, and he doesn't grasp the principles which underlie such a branch of the law as that of crimes.

Besides his immaturity, however, he lacks the background and the breadth of education to make him really able to understand adequately those subjects or other subjects of the law-school curriculum. Surely the man is better prepared to take up the study of constitutional law who has had collegiate courses in English and American constitutional history. He can better deal with questions arising in the study of corporations, or public service, or negotiable paper, or contracts if he has had the fundamental courses in economics, and particularly if he has had such courses as accounting, banks and banking, and corporate finance, and he is better able to understand the modern trend of criminal law, for instance, if he knows something of sociology.

That, however, is, of course, a narrow point of view; namely, the point of view of the man himself who is entering upon the study of the law. We should look at the question, rather, from the viewpoint of the public.

As we know, especially as lawyers know, the law is a complex and a difficult subject, and it is certainly not

growing less so as the years go on, and the interests of practically the whole population of the country, in our domestic as well as in our foreign relationships, are put into the keeping, for the most part, of the legal profession. In view of these circumstances, is not the individual, or the corporation, let us say, which has a large constitutional question to be decided, or the individual whose property rights are threatened, or the person whose life or liberty is in jeopardy, entitled to have his advisers and his counsel and the judges, chosen from the bar, as thoroughly prepared as they possibly can be? We know that during the history of this country the lawyers have been the leaders in their communities, and that the legal profession has furnished a large part of our statesmen, and the majority of our legislators in both the state and national legislatures. But we are told that at present the tendency is to distrust the legal profession, and that the lawyers are losing their position of leadership. To whatever extent that may be true, it seems to me that it results from two causes which are very closely allied. One is the lack of broad and thorough training of the whole bar, and the other is the changing character of the personnel of the bar. It seems to me that if we had a bar so thoroughly trained, so broadly educated, that its members would appreciate not only the opportunity but the obligations of a public life, and would subscribe to and uphold the best traditions of the profession, and would adequately protect the interests of their clients, that we should not have any difficulty in keeping the confidence of the public and in justifying a claim to leadership which, I am convinced, is an entirely logical claim on the part of a well-trained bar.

It may be that the ideal situation is for a man to have a college education before he enters upon a study of the law, and I should be very much surprised if the members of this Association-if the great majority of them would not want their sons to have such a college education before

entering upon the study of the law, if they meant to enter the legal profession. But I am not interested at the present moment in what is the ideal situation, but in what is the reasonable minimum to be required in the way of education before a person enters upon the study of the law. I feel very strongly that the reasonable minimum is a two years' college preparation before one enters upon the study of the law. This is not the ideal but the reasonable minimum. You have, of course, a logical break at the end of the second year of college. The first two years are, after all, but preparation. They deal with fundamental courses. The last two years, however, are in a way and to a considerable extent specialization, and there is a certain logic, therefore, in making a break at the end of the two years, so that at that point a man may specialize in his professional work, having at least gotten a foundation for higher intellectual endeavor. Furthermore, the man who has had two years of college work gets an opportunity for excellent courses in English and perhaps in a foreign language. Now, none of us will doubt, I think, that an intelligent use of English is of vast importance to a lawyer, and a knowledge of a modern language may certainly not come amiss. Furthermore, he gets advanced courses in mathematics and some work in the sciences. There is nothing, probably, which trains a man's mind so well in logical and close thinking as mathematics. Of course, sciences are largely applied mathematics, and surely the foundation of a successful lawyer is logical and close thinking and reasoning. Also, the sciences and the other courses have at least the advantage of giving a man an introduction to scientific knowledge, and he does not flounder quite so much, having had that introduction, when he has to deal with experts in scientific matters. But the important thing about two years of college work is that a man gets the elemental courses in economics, and in the practice of the law to-day, who will dispute the advantages of a pre