Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 02.pdf/178

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The Albany Law School. upon the Law School; affording as it will to students opportunities of listening frequently to the highest displays of judicial reasoning on questions of great and absorbing interest." They also stated that " the price of board in respectable families ranges from $2 to $2.50 per week."1 Excepting the last, the fore going advantages all exist to-day. Albany is undoubtedly the best place in this country for the study of law, leaving law schools out of the question.

_ The State Law Li brary, now housed in the magnificent new Capitol, contains fortyfive thousand volumes. The Court of Appeals is the most important court in the country, excepting the Su preme Court of the United States. There are many fine private lawlibraries and many lawyers doing a large and varied business. I do not know that I should lay much stress on the " incidental benefits" of the Legis lature; and I am sure that the "fossils" and AMOS "morbid specimens" of which the Trustees speak in another part of the circular as im portant aids to education, are not confined to the museum and geological hall. As to board, probably the Trustees' figures should be rather more than doubled, but the "fos sils " and " morbid specimens " are still free.

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Having no endowment and no building of its own, the school was obliged to content itself with rented rooms for several years,1 until about 1854, when the south wing of the Medical College was built for its use, containing but one room, which it occupied until 1879, when it was enabled to procure its present spacious, comfortable, and appro priate quarters in an independent building, in State Street, a few rods from the new Capitol. As was stated in a sketch of the school published in the "Albany Argus " in 1877." During the first few years the school sought merely to aid students in their studies, without adopting any very com prehensive scheme of in struction. By degrees a system of instruction grew up and was en larged, and the length of the course was in creased until it became (as it is now) the long est annual course in the country. Some time after, several years after the opening of the school, DEAN. — the law of the State prescribing no term of study, — it adopted and imposed upon itself a rule, insisting upon at least one academical year's study in the school. This was not a privilege granted to the school, but a rule which it imposed upon itself at a time when its students (young America) were at liberty to walk out of the school, as they often did, in the middle of the course, and

1 Among the " Livingston Correspondence," a col lection of manuscripts described in the sale catalogue 1 The first course of lectures was delivered in a of the library of the late Samuel L M. Barlow, of large hall in a building which formerly stood where New York, is a letter from Peter W. Yates, of Al 1 the new Post-Office and Federal Building now stands, bany, dated Sept. 14, 1782, in answer to Brockholst at the foot of State Street, on Broadway. The next Livingston, who is "anxious to go to Albany to two years the lectures were delivered in the Cooper finish his law-studies," stating that " the price for Building, which stands on the corner of State and boarding will be about,£45 annually." Green Streets.