CHISELING LEGAL TRADITION

By Sarah Baringer Gordon, Professor of Law and History

Faculty, too, were affected by the change. When Lewis joined the faculty in 1896, senior lawyers warned him that teaching law was best considered not a profession, but a hobby.(11) Lewis made sure that the new school was a place of the utmost dedication, for professors as well as students. No longer were faculty primarily identified as practitioners. Instead, law professors were required to devote themselves full-time to teaching, research, and writing. The Law School was integrated into the university, which was itself now systematized according to district new academic disciplines such as political science, economics, anthropology and history. (12) Lawyers, and law teachers, had been "men of letters" in general sense; now they would be trained in a long tradition of legal thought, collected together for the first time into a formal and distinctly jurisprudential curriculu rather than in imitation of particular lawyers.(13)

Each day as students and faculty approached the new Law School, the building spoke to them, presenting not a local vision of apprenticeship in a law office, but a catalogue of legal history that was international in scope, reaching back to the Roman origins of code law and forward to the recent past of nineteenth-century America. The official description of the building and the medallions encircling it made the expectation clear: "Circled so by greatness the student of these days to come will be untrue to all that his eyes behold if he makes no effort to emulate their example."(14)

In 1995, however, the inspirational voice of Lewis Hall has been muted, not just by the architectural obstruction that houses the "Goat," but by changes in the understanding of the legal past, of the relative importance of the figures whose names are carved on the building's exterior, and indeed the relative importance of legal "heroes" in general. What vision of legal institutions and legal history did the building present for students' emulation in 1900?

Most important, central to the relocation of legal training in a university setting, was the construction of an intellectual tradition in which to house the Law School. The envelope of the building memorializes the role of the legal past in the production of the legal future. The medallions, in other words, create a bridge between legal thought in the distant as well as the recent past, and the training of young lawyers -- the future, this view implies, would be conditioned by the grand tradition of the past.(15)