The State University Law School is no less remarkable. In the full cata logue of thirty-four schools two show an enrollment of more than five hundred students. Seven others exceed two hun dred students. In many of them there has been of late a marked tendency to advance the standards of admission and to increase the length of the required course. No less marked is the recent improvement in the material equip ment in libraries and buildings. A comparison of these thirty-four schools shows a certain homogeneity. As a rule, they are in small towns, they are day schools, they are three-year schools, and they have remarkably low tuition fees. In several instances the tuition fee is only a third of that charged at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Pennsyl vania, or Chicago. In some it is only one-sixth. In others there is no tuition fee for resident students. It would seem that law schools organ ized on this basis, and conducted largely at the expense of the Commonwealth, are the expression of some sense of obligation resting on the state. But what this obligation is, and whether it results in a mission which is different from or wider than the mission of non-
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state schools, are questions to which the state university law schools themselves have so far given no clear answer. Rather we have copied the pattern, excellent in its way, of the non-state schools. Our catalogues reflect a trust ing confidence that whatever is, is best. But certainly there are opportunities which belong with peculiar fitness to the state law schools — opportunities directly in line with service to the state. To these schools, rather than to those on private foundations, belong the oppor tunity and the duty which Viner and Blackstone recognized more than a cen tury and a half ago, the duty of enabling every man to obtain "a competent knowledge of the laws of that society in which we live." To the state schools belongs also the duty of providing the professional law student with an oppor tunity to study thoroughly the law of the state which maintains the school — the law of the jurisdiction. To them also belongs the privilege, if not the duty, of providing an educational uplift for the members of the bar within the state, through some proper form of extra mural instruction in law.
Bloomington, Ind.
Get all the entertainment we can out of our work as we go along, for we may rest assured that if we postpone the fun of life until the work is done it will never come. It will find us dry and dusty as so many remainder biscuits after a voyage. — Joseph H. Choate.
