EDUCATION FOR THE ENGLISH BAR IN THE INNS OF COURT. BY JOHN PHILIP HILL. FROM the top of a bus, wedged in the press of traffic on the Strand, with the gray walls of the Courts of Justice towering above, London seems a mass of bricks and stone. Everything and everybody pushes. Even the houses crowd, and one sees churches apparently forced from some nar row lane into the middle of the street. The air is full of smoke and the noise of the crowd. The rush of a great city is all about, and one thinks of the quiet of the fields as an impossible dream. Yet here, in the very core of the most crowded of cities, in this desert of jumbled houses and lanes, are three fair patches of green. Between the Strand and the Thames em bankment, facing the river, are the beautiful garden? of the Temple. Between the Strand and High Holborn the fields of Lincoln's Inn are broad and fair. Just off High Holborn the very elms that Bacon, the Lord Chancel lor, planted in the days of Elizabeth, still border the long walks of Gray's Inn. In all London there cannot be found three more in viting spots. Here one may see rare old carvings, and paintings, and curious bits of architecture, and about the quaint halls and churches and chambers of these ancient closes, cluster rich associations of men who made English history, and moulded English law. In the gardens of the Temple, as Shakes peare tells us in Henry IV., were plucked the roses that gathered the adherents of York and Lancaster in deadly conflict. In Lincoln's Inn fields. Lord William Russell, the "patriot," was executed for alleged com plicity in the Rye House plot. Goldsmith and Fielding and Johnson lived in these pre cincts, and in the Temple, once the abode of the proud knights that warred for the Holy Sepulchre, have feasted Queen Elizabeth and
the great men of England. The Inns abound with literary and historic associations, but for the lawyer their chief interest is due to their having been the nurseries of the common law of England. For the student of the law the great fact is that here Blackstone and Mans field and Erskine delved into the mysteries of the Year Books; that, as Thackeray says in Pendennis, "yonder Eldon lived—up this side Coke mused upon Lyttleton; here Chitty toiled,—here Barnwell and Alderson joined their famous labors,—here Byles composed his great work upon Bills, and Smith com piled his immortal leading cases." In an article in /j Harvard Law Review, Dicey, the distinguished English scholar, says that the student at the Harvard Law School is "to be compared with a student of an Inn of Court, who is eating his terms and beginning to rcail in Chambers." For one not acquainted with the English system of legal education this comparison must prove somewhat puzzling. He wonders why the English student eats his terms, and in what sort of an Inn he does it, and how thereby he fattens in legal lore. In this paper I shall endeavor to answer some of these queries. First, I shall give a short account of the his tory, housing and constitution of the Inns of Court. I shall then sketch briefly the course of a student in an Inn of Court in the days of Coke, and thereafter attempt to show the place the Inns hold in the scheme of educa tion for the English Bar at the present time. The late Justice Maule, in response to a question as to the essentials for success at the bar, is reported to have replied: "There are but three things necessary,—the first is high animal spirits; the second is high animal spirits, and the third is high animal spirits. If, in addition, a young man will take the trouble to read a little law, I do not think it
