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THE LAW SCHOOL
THE establishment of the department. — It has now been officially decreed that the birthday of the University of Michigan is August 16, 1817, and that the birth certificate is "an act to establish the Catholepistemiad, or University, of Michigania." The author of this act was a lawyer, Judge Augustus Woodward. He provided for thirteen didaxiim, or professorships, including a didaxia of medical sciences but no didaxia of the law. Although in Judge Woodward's fantastic analysis of the field of knowledge, in his book A System of Universal Science, he included the law as a department called themistia under the division of ethica, yet there is no evidence that in his Catholepistemiad he planned for a didaxia, or professorship, of law, much less of a department of law, in the University of Michigania.
This is not strange, for in 1817 law schools in the modern sense were unknown. At that date it was the universal practice to prepare for admission to the bar by private study, usually under the tutelage of a lawyer and in his office. Professorships of law there had been. One was held by Wythe at William and Mary, one by Wilson at Philadelphia, still another by Kent at King's College (later Columbia), and a few others, but the first law school, if the so-called Litchfield School of Judge Reeve, which flourished from 1784 to 1833 in Connecticut, be excepted, was Harvard, established in 1817, at Cambridge. There, two professors and three students in two small rooms constituted the beginning of the first separate law school connected with a university. By 1837 the brilliant work and strong personality of Story had built up the school's enrollment to sixty-three.
Twenty years later, on March 18, 1837, the organic act of the University of Michigan, under which the present-day University in Ann Arbor came into existence, was approved. Section 8 provided that "the university shall consist of three departments. 1st. The department of literature, science, and the arts. 2d. The department of law. 3d. The department of medicine." It was also provided that professorships should be established in the Department of Law: "one of natural, international and constitutional law; one of common and statute law and equity; one of commercial and maritime law" (Laws, p. 102).
If before 1817 there had been no law school as part of a university, by 1837 it was quite otherwise. Of such schools still surviving there were then Harvard (1817), Yale (1824), University of Virginia (1826), University of Cincinnati (1833), and New York University (1835). But enrollments were small; nearly all lawyers still came to the bar by the office route, though here and there it began to be sensed that this was not adequate preparation. Men learned to be lawyers at the expense of their clients, law tended to be an art and not a science, lawyers to be artisans skilled in narrow and mechanical technique — pettifoggers and not scholarly lawyers and judges with broad views of their science. There were, however, many exceptions.
The very slender resources of the University delayed realization of the plans of the act of 1837. The medical profession urged vigorously the establishment of a school of medicine, but the great body of lawyers was indifferent or even hostile to the idea of a law school. And so medicine, though named third and after