SOCIOLOGICAL JURISPRUDENCE the basis of doctrines, not in Blackstone's wisdom of our ancestors, not in the apocry phal reasons of the beginnings of legal science, not in their history, useful as that is in enabling us to appraise doctrines at their true value, but in a scientific apprehension of the relations of law to society and of the needs and interests and opinions of society of to-day. Ample reason for the present condition of jurisprudence in America is to be found in the dominance of practitioners and of the ideas and ideals of practitioners in legal education. So long as the one object is to train practitioners who can make money at the Bar, and so long as schools are judged' chiefly by their success in afford ing such training, we may expect nothing better. Yet this is an explanation rather than an excuse. The schools must teach the rules by which the courts decide cases. They cannot teach a different law from that which is recognized and enforced by the courts. But they are not bound to teach traditional legal pseudo-science. They are not bound to teach the practi tioner's philosophy of law, however much he may think it involved in the very idea of a legal system. It is not long ago that a fictitious legal history was equally orthodox. Freeman tells us of a law-teacher who "required the candidates for degrees to say that William the Conqueror intro duced the feudal system at the great Gemot of Salisbury in 1086, 1,1 and when remonstrance was made by the historian, replied that he was examiner in law; that "facts might be found in chronicles, but law was to be found in Blackstone; it was to be found in Blackstone as an infallible source; what Blackstone said, he, as a law -examiner, could not dispute."2 But courts and law books can no more make 1 It is interesting to note that this statement is still with us in law-teaching. Mordecai, Law Lectures, 24 (1907). 1 Freeman, Methods of Historical Study, 73-74-
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authoritative philosophy than they can make authoritative history. I do not advocate the adding of any new course or new courses to our curricula. Doubtless the schools are offering now all the courses that students may take with profit. But law schools not only make tough law,1 they make tough legal science, as the long postponement of the German code through dominance of the historical school, the persistence of eighteenth-cen tury theories in American legal thought, long after they had been abandoned in all other fields, and the sturdy resistance of common-law individualism to the collectivist tendencies of modern thought abun dantly witness. We must not make the mistake in American legal education of creating a permanent gulf between legal thought and popular thought. But we may commit this mistake not merely by teaching legal pseudo-science and obsolete philosophy but quite as much by the more prevalent method of saying nothing about these matters at all, leaving the student to pick up what he may here and there in the cases and texts, with no hint that there are other conceptions and other theories entertained by scholars of no small authority, and to go forth in the belief that he is completely trained.2 I have little faith in abstract courses, even if our schools had room for any new courses. Instruction of the sort required must be concrete. It must lie in the point of view from which concrete legal problems are discussed, concrete doctrines are expounded, and actual decisions are investigated and criticized. The modern teacher of law should be a student of sociology, economics, and politics as well. He should know not only what the courts decide and the principles by which they decide, but quite 1 Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance, 25* Complaint has been made in France to the same effect. Vareilles-Sommieres, Principes Fondamentaux du Droit, preface.
