Recent Legal Literature

Calvert: Regulation of Commerce, Under the Federal Constitution; Prentice: The Federal Power over Carriers and Corporations; McCall: the Clerk\u27s Assistant, containing a large variety of legal forms and instruments adapted not only to county and town officers, but to the wants of professional and business men throughout the United States

Should Applicants for Admission to the Bar Be Required to Take a Law School Course?

If the requirements for admission to the bar had been advanced in any thing like equal degree with the progress made in law schools, there would be unqualified reasons for rejoicing in the prospect. Unfortunately, however, this is far from the case, though some notable advances even in this respect have been made. It is remarkable and unfortunate that in America and in Great Britain, whose system of law is undoubtedly the most difficult of all systems in the world to master, we require no institutional or school training of the men who are to fill the important functions of lawyer, judge, legislator, and public administrator. In nearly all of the European countries such a requirement is made. The prospective lawyer must study in an approved school before he becomes eligible for his final examinations. The same conditions prevail in the United States, as to medicine but not a single state in the Union requires that the candidate for admission to the bar shall have spent a single day even in a law schooL. This is certainly most extraordinary, for private or office study is wholly inadequate as a training for the modem lawyer. The gap between such a training and that given by a good law school is immeasurable

Legal Education and Admission to the Bar

From Conclusions: We cannot close this report with some general remarks concerning standards of admission to the bar. An examination of the Proceedings of the American and the various state bar associations during the last few years will show a constant expression of dissatisfaction with the comparatively low standards for admission which prevail ..

Defects in Our Legal System

That the practice of law and the administration of justice are under a fire of popular distrust and criticism of extraordinary intensity requires no proof. A fact of which there is evidence in numerous contemporary books, in almost every magazine, in the daily papers, in the remarks, or the questions, or it may be in the sneers, of one\u27s friends, requires no further demonstration. The only questions of importance to be answered are to what extent this criticism and this distrust are well founded, what are the remedies for such defects as exist, and how and by whom should they be applied? Shall lawyers allow their just indignation at such of these criticisms as grow out of ignorance and prejudice to blind them to those that are true, or to steel them into an attitude of indifference to, or of assumed contempt for, this entire popular out-cry? This would indeed be a course of folly, not to say of professional suicide, one which would inevitably result in the laying of alien and unskilled hands upon the temple of justice, in crude and ignorant efforts to repair the breaches in the temple walls and to remodel them to meet the new necessities of changed times and conditions. That this is no fancied danger we have had already convincing evidence. Our delay as a profession in correcting defects\u27 in our legal institutions, and in adjusting them to the needs of contemporary society, has afforded the opportunity, if indeed it has not actually invited from outsiders, countless suggestions of alleged reforms and some well organized and powerful efforts to accomplish them. These have ranged from the foolish and sometimes dangerous nostrums of ignorant quacks and demagogues to the well-meant proposals of serious minded and patriotic men. While some of these plans are utterly impracticable, or ineffectual or positively harmful, others contain suggestions of merit, which deserve the serious and respectful attention of the Bar

What Is the Outlook for the Lawyer?

This is a question which is being asked with frequency and painful anxiety all over the country by young men expecting to go to the bar and by many who have only recently been admitted. To the veterna practitioner at the bar it may seem presumptuous that devoting his entire time and energy to law school work should undertake any sort of answer to the question thus propounded. Nevertheless, I venture to say the opportunities for studying and estimating the conditions and factors which must be taken into account in reaching and answer are in some respects quite good for the observer in a law school as for anyone else. Tendencies finding their roots in underlying conditions and the state of litigation and other law businesses in the mass, rather than the condition of business in a particular office or city or state, will determine prospects for the new generation of lawyers. These underlying conditions, these tendencies, the mass and character of litigated business throughout the country, and to a large extent the volume and king of non-litigated legal business, may be studied and analyzed by the observer in a law school about as well as by anyone else. Furthermore, the law-school man\u27s visits to many parts of the country to attend bar association meetings, and for other purposes, enables him to get the testimony of lawyers in the thick of the fray in different localities. Moreover, in a school with a national constituency the law teacher is in contact with hundreds of young men from all parts of the country - young men who naturall are interested in and reflect conditions in the localities from which they come, and who are particularly eager to inquire about conditions at the local bars. Finally, the inquiries which come to administrative officers of a law school from lawyers desiring to employ young graduates and the inquiries which such officiers naturally make on behalf of the men in their classes throw more light of the same general character upon this problem

Review of International Law and Some Current Illusions and Other Essays, by J. B. Moore

Professor Bates writes: Most timely ... is the publication of this volume of papers by the most distinguished and the most widely experienced American scholar in the field of international law.... Judge Moore is a firm believer in the so-called \u27equality of nations\u27 and contends that an association based upon any other theory merely invites trouble. Nor does he believe that force can be safely relied upon to preserve international peace.... The book is of very great value. Every page of it compels thinking and reflection; moreover it is good reading even for the uninitiated...

Prosecuting and District Attorneys

Professor Bates defines his subject matter Prosecuting and district attorneys are judicial officers of the state, within their respective districts, although not officers of the state at large. Under some statutes they are county officers, while under others they are not, but are circuit or district officers.... Like other attorneys, prosecuting and district attorneys are officers of the court; but they are not a part of the court because of their office. A two-page outline precedes the entry

What Shall the Union Club House Be?

In the October issue of The Alumnus, Mr. William N. Brown raises the question, whether, if the Memorial Committee should depart from its original plan to erect such a memorial building as was at first contemplated, and incorporate into its scheme some of the features proposed for the Union club house, it would be wise to include any sort of restaurant department. From the beginning, the board of directors of the Union have adhered steadfastly to the opinion that a restaurant department is necessary to the complete success of its proposed club house and to the full realization of all the beneficial posibilities of the Union itself. This belief is strengthened by the unvarying testimony from our sister universities and colleges like Harvard, Pennsylvania, Chicago and Dartmouth, where the experiment has been tried and its success already demonstrated

Race Segregation Ordinance Invalid

The opinion in Buchanan v. Warley reflects the confusion and difficulty of that troublesome problem, the place of the negro race in the United States, with which the case and the segregation ordinance of Louisville discussed therein are essentially concerned. The decision by a unanimous court reverses the holding of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, and declares that the ordinance violates the Fourteenth Amendment. This result is reached by one of those anomalous and objectionable devices which characterize our methods of solving fundamental constitutional questions. The case arose upon a bill for specific performance of a contract, whereby the plaintiff, a white man, agreed to sell, and defendant, a colored man, agreed to buy certain real estate situated in a block in which the majority of houses were occupied by white people. The defense was based upon a provision of the contract to the effect that the purchaser should not be required to perform unless he had the right under the laws of the State of Kentucky and the City of Louisville to occupy said property as a residence, and upon the ordinance above referred to. That ordinance, approved May 11, 1914, in effect prohibits any colored person to move into and occupy, as a residence, or to establish and maintain as a place of public assembly, any house upon any block upon which a greater number of houses are occupied for such purposes by white people than by colored people. Another section contains the converse of this prohibition; and by still another the location of residences and of places of assembly made, and the continued occupancy of such premises begun by white or colored persons, prior to the approval of the ordinance, are expressly excepted from the scope and effect thereof. It would be difficult to frame an ordinance which should accomplish any measure of segregation, with more restricted scope or less effect upon property rights than this one. If the present decision shall stand, therefore, it would seem that race segregation by legal compulsion, at least in cities, must be abandoned as a vain effort

Child Labor Law Case, Commerce Power of Congress and Reserved Powers of the States

The decision in the Child Labor Law case, Hammer v. Dagenhart, - U. S. -, 62 L. ed. -, decided June 3, 1918, would have caused much less surprise twenty-five years ago than it did when announced last June, for it is based upon two constitutional provisions concerning which the much wider and more varied experience of the last quarter century had developed theories, better defined and sounder than those of the earlier period. Those two provisions are the Tenth Amendment regarding the powers reserved to the States and the Commerce Clause. There has been an astonishing amount of faulty reasoning about the Tenth Amendment in its relation to Federal powers. Over and over again courts and writers have argued as if certain powers, or powers of certain kinds had been reserved to the States and therefore that the Federal Government could not possibly have or exercise powers that touched those fields; or, to put it otherwise, that the Federal Government could not exercise even its granted powers, as those over commerce or to make treaties, if such exercise would affect matters concerning which the States also possessed power. But this is a diametrically wrong way to approach the distribution of powers between the Federal and the State Governments. Certain powers have been given to the Federal Government. In the nature of the case, and as the Supreme Court has declared repeatedly, these powers, many. of them stated only in geenral outline, are and must be c apable of indefinite expansion, or more accurately their application is and must be to a changing and always increasing number of objects and situations