The State University Law School: I, Its Rise and Its Mission BY CHARLES M. HEPBURN PROFESSOR OF LAW IN INDIANA UNIVERSITY DOES the true mission of the state university law schools differ in any material respect from the true mis sion of other university law schools? If it does, what is this mission? These related questions have been submitted to the deans of several state university law schools, east and west. The answers, in the form of distinct articles, will appear in later issues of the Green Bag. But as a preliminary to these more interesting articles, and while they are in the making, a few things may be said about the rise of law schools of this kind, their present number and their possible field of usefulness. Between the opening of the earliest university law school in America and the opening of our earliest state univer sity law school there was an interval of nine years. The Harvard Law School, succeeding a privately endowed pro fessorship of law, began its career in 1817; the law school of the University of Virginia, an integral part of Jeffer son's original plan for a state univer sity, began in 1826. In the view of today there is in this nothing that is specially significant. We have grown accustomed, through the experience of half a century, to an aver age of two new law schools a year; and today a six months old university of a new fledged state is hardly entitled to recognition unless it has its university school of law. But such was not the view of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The
tradition then, in America as in Eng land, ran strongly against the idea of professional teaching of law in the uni versities. Isolated college professorships in law had indeed appeared here and there, and had been held by distinguished law yers. The law professorship which Jefferson, in 1779, induced the College of William and Mary to substitute for an existing professorship in divinity, had been occupied by Chancellor Wythe, and had numbered John Marshall in its list of students — the future Chief Justice thus attending the first course of law lectures ever given by a professor of law in an American college. Mr. Justice Wilson, of the Supreme Bench of the United States, with Wythe a signer of the Declaration of Independence, held for a time the law professorship which was established in 1790 in the College of Philadelphia. Chancellor Kent was the incumbent of the professor ship of law which was established in Columbia College in 1793, and as such began that brilliant career of legal authorship for which he is chiefly re membered. And beyond the moun tains, Henry Clay was for two years professor of law in Transylvania Uni versity, at Lexington, Kentucky. These beginnings were auspicious enough. With all the prestige of the splendidly equipped law schools of to day, it would be hard to match the opening of the first course of law lec tures at Philadelphia in 1790; for the
