CHISELING LEGAL TRADITION

By Sarah Baringer Gordon, Professor of Law and History

Until the turn of the twentieth century, the Law Department of the University of Pennsylvania (as it was then known) was in a physical sense a rootless institution. In 1879, the law school had 141 students enrolled in its two year program, almost all of them from Philadelphia.(2) The school migrated from one set of cramped quarters to another in the 1880s and 1890s, ranging from the new Philadelphia City Hall, to the Girard Life Insurance Building at Broad and Chestnut, and Independence Hall. Although the university administration attempted repeatedly in the second half of the nineteenth century to attach the law school to the new West Philadelphia campus,(3) the gravitational pull of courts and private law offices drew the school back to the city, where students spent their days as apprentices, faculty as practitioners.(4) As William Draper Lewis put it, "The normal concept of a law school was that of a place where in the late afternoon lawyers, harassed with their own business, read lectures to sleepy office students." (5) Lewis was the school's first full-time faculty member, Dean from 1897 to 1914. His was the transforming hand that crafted modern legal education at Penn Law School.(6)

Through the construction of a physical space that redefined the scope of legal training for students and the responsibilities of legal academics, Penn Law swelled the growth of university-based Law Schools dedicated to professional training,(7) and at the same time added a perspective unique to Penn, and to Lewis. The central role of legal history in this transformation is evident not only in the new Law School curriculum (which included a course in the history of the common law, taught by Dean Lewis himself and based on Lewis's recently published edition of Blackstone's Commentaries (8)) but in the entire structure. The design of the building consciously echoes the seventeenth-century designs of English architect Sir Christopher Wren.(9) In order to present to you the complete history of the events, people, and our buildings, we have divided it into several parts.

The most important, most visible connection of the new Law School with an ancient and venerable legal tradition is the collection of medallions that circle the building. The very concept of a university-based Law School reflected a profound change in legal education; the medallions anchored the change in the accomplishments of the legal past.

When Lewis Hall (now Silverman Hall, then known simply as the "Law School Building") opened in February of 1900, the Law School had grown exponentially -- 246 students from many states were registered, half of whom intended to practice law outside of Philadelphia, and many of whom had earned bachelor's degrees before admittance. Although the School still allowed admission from non-college graduates with degrees from "advanced" public high schools or upon a rigorous examination, the catalogue warned applicants that "A large number of those who study law are college graduates; and those who are not cannot hope, except in rare instances, to compete successfully with the college man." (10)