HAVE THE BENCH AND BAR ANYTHING TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE TEACHING OF LAW?

Authors

Learned Hand, Judge of the United States Circuit Court, for the Second Circuit

Abstract

The teaching of lawyers is indeed as distinct a vocation from the practice of law, as law is from engineering or science. You have of recent years come practically to recognize it by your increasing insistence upon the teacher's exclusive devotion to his calling, so that I suppose not only has the well-worn practitioner wholly disappeared, who from his semi-antiquation delivers a course of lectures, but the part time teacher even in the prime of his powers is more and more evidently doomed. I cannot see this change as anything but happy and advantageous. If for no other reason I should be glad to rest my case upon the necessarily superficial scholarship of both bench and bar, with the rarest exceptions. The conditions of our calling preclude us from gaining a systematic understanding of the law or even of keeping up with its course. We are predetermined sciolists, compelled to maintain some working acquaintance with the whole field, and consequently incapable of thorough knowledge in any part.

Recommended Citation

Learned Hand, HAVE THE BENCH AND BAR ANYTHING TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE TEACHING OF LAW?, 24 Mich. L. Rev. 466 (1926).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol24/iss5/4