When it opened in 1900, the new law school
building was the largest building devoted solely to the education
of lawyers in the country. At opening ceremonies, Supreme Court
Justice John Marshall Harlan and Chinese Minister Wu Ting-Fang,
as well as leading legal academics, gave speeches to a large crowd
of assembled dignitaries and lawyers. As William Draper Lewis put
it, the educational ideal behind construction of the new building
was the training of "efficient lawyers." |
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)
This portrait of William Draper Lewis, was
painted in 1934 by Robert Susan. At the dedication ceremony, Lewis
reminisced: "When I became dean the only other person besides myself
who gave all his time to the Law School was a man who was sup-posed
to keep the cuspidors clean and did not. I discharged him; destroyed
the cuspidors and stood alone." |
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)
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