Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 01.pdf/127

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
There was a problem when proofreading this page.
106
The Green Bag.

he said. He always spoke standing; and he has told me that if he should sit down and undertake to state anything, he would instantly jump up, for it was impossible for him to sit still while he was talking. It was natural for him to arise as if addressing a court or a jury. "Judge Hare has said that the discussion of real estate law in the Law School requires practical skill in its presentation, in order not to repel the student. The real estate law is the backbone

of the common law, and it is necessary that it should be thoroughly comprehended and studied. Mr. Mitchell was enabled to teach it with great success, be cause he stripped it of all its technical forms, and where it was only mechanical and techni cal, and where it had become tedious and ob scure by over-repetition, he presented it in a way that seemed to refresh and revitalize the subject; and in reproducing those abstract subjects, one would think he was presenting his own rea soning, so clear were his explanations of what the law is. He took the law, and, instead of presenting E. COPPEE it as a thing of the dead past, he brought it down to the present day, so that it was presented by him just as it appears to-day in the practice of conveyancing and in the discussions in our courts." To this he, upon whose weaker shoulders the University has laid the burden of suc ceeding Professor Mitchell in the Chair of Real Estate Law, may add that every day which he has spent in the performance of his duty as a professor has caused him more and more to appreciate the high character of his predecessor's work, and to realize that Professor Mitchell's untimely death has been

an irreparable loss to the University and to the cause of legal education. It need not be said that a school which numbered among its teachers such men as Chief-Justice Sharswood, Judge Hare, Mr. McCall, Mr. Miller, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Mitchell, and those who were associated with them, gave thorough instruction in the law. But those professors, in the perform ance of their duties, labored under disad vantages which have happily been removed from the paths of their successors. The course was in their time limited to two years, each year in cluding two terms of four months each, with an aggregate of ten hours of instruction each week. Now the course has been ex tended to three years, with a minimum of twenty hours of in struction in each week. For several years preceding the present year the lec tures and examina tions have been con MITCHELL ducted at the Uni versity Buildings in West Philadelphia, at a distance from the homes of the students and from the offices of their preceptors. Now the Law School has obtained commodious quarters in the building of the Girard Trust Company at Broad and Chestnut Streets, in the business centre of the city and in convenient prox imity to the homes of the students, the of fices of their preceptors, and the courts. The whole of the sixth floor of that, build ing will be occupied by the lecture rooms, library, and the offices of the executive de partment of the school Until the present