As to the second point the Court cited authorities showing that at common law an alien was disqualified from holding an office of trust. Taswell-Langmead, 6th ed. 523; 1 Halsbury's Laws of England, 303; Anthony v. Seger (1789), 1 Hagg 9; Johnson v. Pedlar, [1921] 2 A. C. 276; Iowa v. Van Beek, 19 L. R. A. 622. The Inspector had by section 28 of "The Nova Scotia Temperance Act" all the authority conferred by statute on constables, etc., and the office was therefore one of trust and incapable of being held by an alien. The effect of the Naturalization Act, 1919, c. 38, was to make him an alien in Canada for all purposes, and in the absence of any statute conferring capacity to hold such office he was clearly ineligible to do so.

On the hearing of the information it appeared that subsequently to the previous motion and before the filing of the information Heighton had resumed his British nationality under the Naturalization Act. The trial Judge, Mr. Justice Chisholm, held that Heighton was an alien and therefore disqualified, and that the subsequent naturalization was immaterial as the matter was to be dealt with as on the facts existing when the proceedings were launched: The King v. Heighton (No. 2), 55 N. S. R. 527. But on this latter point cf. Iowa v. Van Beek, 54 N. W. Rep. 525.

V. C. M.

SOME PHASES OF AMERICAN LEGAL
EDUCATION.1

BY HARLAN F. STONE, PH.D.

Dean of Columbia Law School.

It is within the limit of conservative statement to say that the development of systematic law study in the United States is one of the most interesting and remarkable chapters in the entire history of education.

Roman law has been for so many hundreds of years traditionally a university study, especially in England and on the European continent, that one finds himself at the outset under the necessity of accounting for the fact that our English common law and equity did not in any proper sense become the subject of university study until the latter part of the 19th century, and that then the first step was taken in an American university. It is true that James Kent, following the example of Blackstone, at Oxford, began in 1823, at Columbia College, the remarkable series of lectures which ultimately ripened into his Commentaries on American Law, but his lectures, as were Blackstone's, were soon discontinued. It was not until 1858 that Columbia organized a school of law for the training of lawyers under the leadership of Theodore Dwight.

In the meantime Harvard College had established a law school under the leadership of Story, which was continued as the Dane Law School under the direction of Parker and Parsons. In the case of both the Columbia and Harvard schools in these early days, with all due respect to the great service they rendered in their time and generation, they were rather loosely related to the University; and, judged by present-day standards, they resembled trade schools rather more than our present-day university law schools, in which

This paper was read by Dean Stone before the Ontario Bar Association in 1922.

emphasis is placed on the study of law as a science by the methods of scholarship and research applied generally in university studies.

The reason for this tardiness in occupying a field so worthy of the enterprise of scholarship in contrast with the treatment of Roman law by the universities, is easily accounted for. The Roman law was transmitted to Western Europe through the mediæval universities. From the chaos which followed the fall of the Roman Empire, the universities gathered up and preserved for Western civilization the learning of the Roman law system, and when, with the revival of trade and the stimulation of every form of commercial activity, the peoples of western Europe found their own customary local law too crude and imperfect for their purposes, they turned to the universities as the repositories of knowledge of a legal system suited to their needs.

Hence it is that the civil law system of the European continent is directly a re-creation, organized, developed and expounded by the universities. But in England the development proceeded along different lines and for reasons readily understood. There the trade revival came more tardily and progressed more slowly. Hence the need for a developed system of law did not outstrip the resources of the local common law. But what was more important, the operation of those mysterious forces which originate and give direction to the development of the great races of the earth, guided the evolution of a people who had a genius for law equal to that of the Romans; and their genius found expression in law which has been forged between the hammer and anvil of opposing counsel in the course of the trial of actual controversies in court.

It is this process of generating law from facts proven in litigation which has given the common law its adaptability and vitality, and its capacity when brought into contact with other systems of law to supplant them; and it is the emphasis on this process

which has made us so tenacious of the tradition of the apprentice-trained lawyer.

Hence it is that in England for some six centuries. the universities went on teaching Roman law as one of the great branches of human knowledge, while the courts went on building up and elaborating an even greater system of the common law without any very direct assistance from the universities. And during all this time the lawyer acquired his knowledge of the principles of his art mainly in the workshop of the courts, just as during the same period the votary of the mechanical arts acquired his knowledge and his technical skill in the forge and in the factory.

This is the tradition which the English colonists brought with them to your country and to mine, a tradition which has been singularly persistent in both, but perhaps even more so in Canada than in the United States, and which in both countries has coloured all our thinking on the subject of legal education.

But just as the science of Engineering can no longer be taught in field and workshop, but must be subjected to the processes of scholarship in order that the student may acquire a mastery of it, so more and more we are finding that the great body of law which our common law and equity systems have developed, can be adequately mastered and understood only by means of academic study, aided by the services of a highly trained and specially skilled pedagogy. This change in educational procedure is to be attributed mainly to two factors. First, inherent in the law itself, is the tendency of case-law to beget law and to increase in volume and complexity as our social organization becomes more complex. And then there is the tendency of all law when applied in a wide territorial area to develop local variations and special doctrines in order to adapt itself to local situations.

Kent, in the United States, first turned our attention toward the treatment of law as a science, when by his lectures and his commentaries he made it clear that our law was something more than a conglomeration

of empiricism and that it could be classified and reduced to orderly statement with reference to its underlying principles and doctrines. But it was our rapid social and economic development during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the stimulating effect of the establishment of forty-eight jurisdictions independent of each other so far as the application of the great body of the law is concerned, which have expanded our law and added to its complexity, and which have finally brought it into the universities as a legitimate and necessary subject of university study.

It has been brought there because of the practical need of better professional training; hence law study in our law schools has hitherto had as its main objective the more thorough and more scientific training of students who expect to become lawyers, but one can now begin to discern in the better American law schools a tendency toward the development of another important function, that of systematically contributing to the movement toward law simplification which has been made inevitable by the growing complexity of law and the enormous growth in the mere mass of material from which we must draw our knowledge of precedent.

The same causes will, I believe, develop the same tendencies in your country, if indeed, they are not already doing so. You have in Canada a number of jurisdictions not independent in the matter of law making and administration in the same sense that our States are, yet with sufficient autonomy, especially in matters of legislation, to produce the development of local variations of law grafted upon the common stock of law inherited from the mother-country. You are destined, too, to have here a social and economic development on a large scale, bringing with it a corresponding amplification and complexity of your law.

It is because I believe you are to have an experience in many respects similar to ours, that I was eager to avail of this opportunity to tell you what our experi

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