CHISELING LEGAL TRADITION

By Sarah Baringer Gordon, Professor of Law and History

Lewis himself answered this call to action; he also believed that law professors were particularly well situated to effect reform. Although his political career consisted largely of one unsuccessful run for governor of Pennsylvania on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912, (39) Lewis's dedication to reform went far beyond traditional politics. It was Lewis, of course, who founded the American Law Institute in the early 1920s.(40) The ALI, as one scholar has demonstrated, was conceived by "a group of 'progressive-pragmatic' legal academics, who wished to reform law and promote the influence of law professors in the wider world of legal practice."(41) Lewis believed, as he put it, that the professoriate must lead the way in reform, because the private bar had failed to work substantial justice. (42)

Our legal pantheon has changed; for example, we might well question the inclusion of Roger Brooke Taney, third chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, author of the infamous majority opinion in the Dred Scott case.(43) The very concept of "greatness" seems in fundamental doubt, much less attributable to a collection of elite men from the legal past. Yet even in this age of the anti-hero, there can be little doubt that the emulation of kind, honest and independent-minded legal actors is an ambition worth imparting to law students. For individuals, as William Draper Lewis understood, and as the architecture of the University of Pennsylvania Law School proclaims, have made a difference in the past; we study the lives of the legal past, as one eminent legal historian put it, "to learn the gestures a committed person makes."(44)

The medallions are not the final word on legal greatness, however. The final focus of progressive development over time, the architectural celebration of legal figures surrounding the building and leading up to the entrance, occurs inside the building itself. Opposite the front entrance, in full view straight ahead on the massive staircase leading up to the library from the Great Hall, stands a statue of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, who led the most massive legal and political reform the United States has ever known,(45) is a superb example of legal greatness as Lewis Hall has memorialized it -- of revolution in the interest of tradition.(46) For Lincoln avowedly fought to realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, even as he fundamentally restructured the legal landscape in the interests of fundamental justice.(47) END