The Legal Profession: The Training and Literature of Law

Abstract

This chapter discusses changes in the legal profession in the second half of the nineteenth century, covering the rise of the law school, the literature of the law, and legal periodicals and casebooks. No state in the nineteenth century made a law degree, or a college degree, a prerequisite for admission to the bar. Many lawyers, however, even in the 1850s, did go to college, and more and more students who could afford it chose law school as well. Indeed, by 1900 it was quite clear that the law schools would come to dominate legal education. After the Civil War, an increasing number of law schools formed some sort of tie with a college or university. More than three-quarters of the schools open and running in the 1890s were of this type.