Although the Law School honored Justinian as one of the "makers of the greatest code formulated by man," the official description of the building also criticized the Roman code as inhumane. Reproduced from Sara Robbins, Law: A Treasury of Art and Literature (1990)

The scope of this tradition, the sense that law and lawyers had a past worthy of memorialization and emulation, stabilized what was, after all, a revolution in legal pedagogy. The presence of the past, one might say, gave the construction of the new law department an aura of reformation and reconstruction, rather than of radical departure from tradition.(16)

Historical consciousness -- the idea that words and meanings in time can best be understood by exploring social and historical contexts -- was itself a concept of relatively recent vintage in the late nineteenth century, (17) but one that has been extraordinarily useful for lawyers.(18) Especially important at the turn of the century, but still vital in much legal thought today, historicism has been a valuable and effective critique of formalism (the idea, that is, that legal rules are timeless) and often of originalism (the idea, that is, that legal rules are fixed by their articulation at a given moment, and do not change from that point on).(19) Historical analysis in legal thought has often flowed into a somewhat self-congratulatory, evolutionary model of linear progress over time. Especially in the Anglo-American legal context, such evolutionary histories are, as one scholar put it, dedicated to answering the question "How did our marvelous liberal and representative institutions develop?"(20) The medallions that ring Lewis Hall are in one sense a study in this progressive theory of legal history.

Roman Emperor Justinian, surrounded by his court, from a mosaic at the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna.

The primary theme governing the selection and distribution of names was, as one might expect, progress over time, with the back of the building representing the earliest and most primitive legal thought, and improvement and increased sophistication leading up the Sansom and Chestnut Street sides, to their apogee in American legal thought on 34th Street. On both sides, European thought flowed into English law, where (we are meant clearly to understand), it was both refined and improved by the common law mind. On the back of the building, for example, are Caius, Ulpean, and Papinian, second century Roman jurists, whom the official description of the building called "the great beginners of Law as we know it ... makers of the greatest code formulated by man, if the least human."(21)

On the Sansom Street side of the building, we find Justinian, sixth-century Emporer of Rome and codifier of Roman law.(22) Moving toward the front of the building, and forward in moral development as well as in time, are collected the group of the great of the common law tradition: King Edward I of England, the man who both codified English law and beat the Scots into submission; Henry de Bracton, a 13th-century English ecclesiastic and jurist, author of the first systematic collection of English law - an early treatise; and finally, Sir Edward Coke. The building committee called Coke "the first of the great English lawyers, the quaint, the patriotic."(23) In addition to being a great practicing lawyer during his long career in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Coke compiled and edited an influential treatise on the law of property, Coke's Littleton. He also published a series of important Law Reports; however, the remainder of his planned Institutes were suppressed and remained in manuscript at his death because of his controversial stand against the absolute authority of the Crown.(24)

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