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Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 5 > Issue 7 (1907)

 

Abstract

Aside from the elementary branches, no particular subject is absolutely essential as a basis for the study and practice of the law. In this respect the law occupies a place somewhat different from that of the other learned professions. The student and practitioner of medicine must of necessity get a substantial scientific foundation for his professional work. This for him is an absolutely essential prerequisite. For the professional courses in engineering, a special and definite scientific preparation must be made. Without it nothing but the most ordinary work in engineering can be accomplished. And it is probable that for theology, work along certain well defined lines is desirable, if not essential. But it by no means follows that because success in the study of the law or in the practice of it does not depend upon the mastery of particular subjects, a thorough preparation therefor is not necessary. The contrary is most emphatically true, particularly at the present time. The law is a practical subject, most intimately connected with the private interests of the citizen and with questions affecting his public rights and obligations, but it is at the same time a science, the mastery of which requires a mental equipment above the ordinary. No one can hope for much success as a student of it without adequate preliminary training, or in its application as an art without being prepared for the keenest kind of intellectual competition. Upon the very threshold of his work the law student discovers that his success is to depend very largely upon his equipment, not upon his having mastered any particular subject but upon his having made himself master of his own mental processes to such an extent that he can do independent and original thinking. The fundamental principles of the different departments of the law must be mastered, and that their full significance may be appreciated, their historical development, through the successive decisions of the courts, must be traced. But he soon discovers that his task embraces more than the memorizing of principles and the study of their origin and growth. His eyes are soon opened to the fact that the serious business of the law student consists in the application of general principles to the solution of problems involving new conditions and varying statements of fact. And then, too, he discovers directly that, although the body of the settled law is large, there are continually arising questions upon which the law is unsettled and whose solution requires the harmonizing, if possible, of conflicting decisions, or where this is not possible, the determination as to the weight of reason and authority. He soon discovers that for every step taken and for every conclusion reached a logical and forceful reason must be assigned. It is needless for me to suggest that work of this nature, if successfully accomplished, calls for analytical power ind constructive ability; it demands the informed and trained judgment of an educated man. While occasionally one having a natural aptitude for the law may be able, even with limited preparation, to master its principles and the art of its application and to push to the front with, apparent ease, the fact remains that, as a rule, the appreciative and successful study of jurisprudence demands preliminary training of a high order and of the thorough, and rigorous kind.

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