A NEW BOND OF EMPIRE.
IT is not often that an application in Chancery is fraught with such vast consequences as that which was decided by Mr. Justice Farwell on Friday week. The application then granted related to certain funds in Court, amounting in the aggregate to about £100,000, forming part of the pro- ceeds of sale of New Inn and Clifford's Inn. The sale had been directed in certain Chancery suits instituted for the purpose of deciding the ownership of these valuable sites, and the funds now in Court represent that portion of the purchase money directed to be appropriated for charitable purposes according to a scheme, or schemes, hereafter to be settled. The Crown asked that no scheme should be brought in until sufficient time had elapsed for the perfecting of one worthy of the possibilities offered by the funds available. These funds are applicable, and solely applicable, for the purposes of legal education, and the question to be decided is the method in which they shall be so applied.
New Inn and Clifford's Inn are Inns of Chancery, and have for centuries played a part of some importance in the education of lawyers. The partition in recent days of the property of certain of these Inns by the trustees who held the fee-simple is matter for some- thing more than regret. Such partition and the absorption of other Inns by the Inns of Court— a fact that the Benchers will doubtless remember when called upon to assist the Attorney-General in perfect- ing his scheme—have materially diminished the funds available for the great project now put forward by the Attorney-General. For more than half a century these Inns have ceased to fulfil any educational purpose what ever; but at last, and at a critical moment in the history of the Empire, their forces, created six centuries ago, are brought once more into the current of national life. The lapse of time has altered the direction of those forces. The direction is still national, but the nation has gone far forward on its great orbit in the two centuries and a half during which the Inns of Chancery have kept their Long Vacation. In the days of their full efficiency, at the opening of the seventeenth century, these Inns fed. the Inns of Court with trained lawyers, and provided an admirable special training for the youths whose ambitions peered through the ever deepening forest of legal technicalities. Since those days the Inns of Court have learned to train their experts in another way, and through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the great lawyers of each generation evolved their knowledge of the principles that lie beneath practical law from their experience as pupils and practitioners in chambers and in Court. Despite the example set by Sir William Black- stone in giving at Oxford in 1754 his famous lectures on English law, it was not until 1852 that the Council of Legal Education was founded in order to give students some opportunity of learning the elements of law before entering into the turmoil of practice, and it was not until 1872 that it became necessary to pee! an examination before taking the important degree which gives the right of audience in the Courts. It was felt— indeed, it is still felt by many—that examinations and lectures can play but little part in the making of a great practical Lawyer, and. that when all is said and done it is competition at the Bar, not competition in the lecture-room, which makes the learned as well as the successful barrister. Thus the painful efforts of the Council of Legal Education to found a real school of law have been rendered nugatory for more than fifty years. There is nothing strange in this from our English educational point of view. Precisely the same thing has happened wherever learning and practical technical work have had any end in common. It is only to-day that we are learning from America and GermallY that technical trades are definitely related to the class- room and the University. To the English manufacturer, to an English engineer or chemist or electrician, the idea is still strange that he should take for his work a youth trained tn the conceptions and principles which are materialised in the output of the trade. It is the same with law in so far as it is a technical business. The manufacturer can appreciate the old apprenticeship system ; the lawyer could understand the analogous system of the Inns of Chancery ; but neither class seem able to realise the value of true apprenticeship,—apprenticeship to prin- ciples. Yet in so far as law is a technical business the training in the principles that underlie it are as necessary as the like principles are to the modern chemist, electrician, or engineer, or as the art and science of education are to the schoolmaster.
But law is something more than a technical business. It is to all nations a philosophy of social life, and. to this nation it is above all things a bond of Empire. Twice before has such a bond been offered to avast social organisation, and twice has it been rejected. Had Imperial Rome so chosen, the appeals from her provinces to the Imperial Tribunals might have formed a bond that would have secured. her from all fear of dissolution. She threw away her oppor- tunity, and the life-flow of justice and all the good things that follow justice ceased to course through her heart. Had Papal Rome so chosen, the appeals that poured in from every district of Christendom to her ecclesiastical Tribunal in the fifteenth century might have formed a bond still unbroken. Instead, she offered to every land a Court of unparalleled slowness, ignorance, and corruption, and threw away her opportunity. To Britain the same opportunity is offered to-day. Since 1833 the 'Judicial Committee of the Privy Council has been hearing appeals from all parts of an ever-growing Empire, and to-day it has to adjudicate on appeals that raise questions of Norman-French law, French law modified by Colonial Legislatures, English law similarly modified in innumerable ways, Hindoo law, Mahom- medan law, Roman-Dutch law in strange guise, and Codes and customs without number. There is hardly a phase of law evolved since the beginning of law-making that does not from time to time come before the Judicial Committee for intkpretation. Such a fact makes the mind pause. We cease to regard law merely as a technical business or as a social philosophy. It is something that is capable of binding together with an adamantine bond the scattered parts of a great Empire. The final source of law for a vast portion of the world's surface is London. Here men come from all quarters of the globe to find law and obtain justice. Surely men should come here also to learn law, to learn how to administer law, to revere the central source of justice. Yet the fact remains that there is no school of law in London open to all corners for the study of com- parative law, jurisprudence, -the science of law, the philosophy of law, the history of law, and particular systems of law and procedure. So far from being the juristic heart of the Empire, our present system is in- capable even of producing a sufficient number of educated lawyers to supply the Colonial demand.
The Attorney-General proposes to create out of the funds derived from the Inns of Chancery the great law school which, it is plain, is urgently needed in London, and has been repeatedly demanded by the great Judges and jurists of the last fifty years. He desires to create "a great school of law under charter or Act of Parliament, in which full provision should be made for the systematic and scientific teaching of all branches of our law, and also of all those other branches of law which are administered in the British Empire. It is the fact that even now students come here from all parts of the Empire to study law. For the pur- pose of such a school of law, in our view, it is essential to have the co-operation of the great historical bodies which have been associated with the study and practice of the law in the country for so long,—namely, the Inns of Court. We have great hopes that the .Inns of Court may take advantage of this occasion to concur in establish- ing a still greater legal University" than that London law school which Coke described as towering above all schools of special study as the cypress towers above the roadside trees. The Attorney-General also pointed out that the Incorporated Law Society, as representing that side of the profession which had for so long a 'period controlled the Inns of Chancery (though it must be confessed without bringing them into the sphere of usefulness), was interested in the scheme. These two bodies, the University of London, and many educational local bodies had applied to the Crown with respect to the disposition of the funds in Court. But. as Sir Robert Finlay pointed out, to scatter this large sum among a number of applicants would be to lose a great opportunity. The only feasible and reasonable scheme is the creation of an Imperial law school in London to which Universities, Colleges, and Law Societies at home and abroad can be affiliated.
The really open question is the part to be played by various bodies in the formation of this school. The public will certainly look in this matter for some help from the Imperial Government. If the school of law is to help India and the Colonies, the Imperial Govern- ment should take an active part in the formation of the school, and should. perhaps at first subsidise it to a consideraible extent. Then, again, much help and encouragement may be looked for from the four Inns of Court. The Attorney-General has great hopes in this direction, and not unreasonably. The growing liberality of spirit that distinguishes the present attitude of these Inns is a sign of the times. They feel naturally that the study of the law must not be left to the Universities ; that it is now more necessary than it ever was that law should be understanded of the people, should be understandable ; that it is therefore absolutely essential that lawyers should be learned in the law. The gradual erection by successive statutes of a Code of English law, necessarily artificial in shape, tends, however, to divorce legal learning from legal practice, and the Inns of Court must do all that in them lies to arrekt this process. They can do so effectually,— first, by fostering, both with money and with the supply of lecturers, the new law school ; and secondly, by making the degree granted by that school a condition precedent to a call to the Bar. The school of law would. thus take over the work of the Council of Legal Education, and would claim monetary grants of considerable magnitude from the Inns, whose wealth, if properly directed, is vely considerable. The Inns of Court would gain in every way. The great influx of students following the establishment of an Imperial law school would fill their coffers with fees, while the men called would necessarily be of a higher intellectual standing than many of those who enter the legal profession to-day. Identical remarks apply to the Incorporated Law Society.
The position of the London University is somewhat different. It will, we should imagine, be asked to merge its legal educational work—including the work of the Quain Chair—in that of the new school, and• to recognise the degrees granted by the school as degrees granted by itself. If the University is• asked to do this, it will claim, and will rightly claim, compensation of some sort,—either in the payment of fees to the University, or by bringing the University into electoral relation with the governing body of the Imperial school. We feel confident, however, that the just demands of the University will be met, and that she will be brought into adequate relationship with the new school. The end in view is a great one—too great to be ruined by any petty disputes about machinery—and there can be no doubt that the University of the Metropolis of the Empire must play its part in the formation and maintenance of this new bond. of Empire,—a tie which will year by year more closely unite in community of• ideal and co-loyalty of life the diverse races whose final judgment,seat is in this island of ours.
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