COLUMBIA LAW SCHOOL AT 150: A TIMELINE

Oct. 4, 1858 is founded at 37 Lafayette Place, though a course on law had been taught at Columbia College by James Kent, author of the renowned Kent Commentaries, as early as 1794. In the first half of the 19th century, law was not taught in schools but learned chiefly through an apprenticeship system.

1858-59 Thirty-three-year-old Theodore Dwight becomes the School’s first warden, the name for “dean,” and he establishes a mode of teaching known as the “Dwight Method.” Office apprenticeship, he argued, left most men with an uneven jumble of isolated legal rules, while his method gave students a systematic view of law as a whole, after which students possessed a framework to interpret the law. “Principles before practice,” was his mantra.

1866 Moot court exercises were used by Dwight in class twice a week. In addition to Dwight, other faculty members included Dr. John Ordronaux, professor of medical jurisprudence, and Charles Nairne, professor of ethics of jurisprudence. Practitioners were also invited to give lectures on special topics.

1867 The Prussian-educated delivers his lectures on the laws of war, the Law School’s first offering in international law. Third U.S. Assistant Secretary of State John Bassett Moore was appointed professor of international law and diplomacy in 1891, building Columbia’s reputation in international law. Shortly after the turn of the century, Moore, along with Professor James Brown Scott and Columbia Dean Kirchwey play a major role in creating the American Society of International Law.

1873 As the City of begins to spread northward, the Law School moves uptown to 8 Great Jones Street. A decade later, the Law School again relocates, this time to Madison Avenue and 49th Street, where Columbia College is also moving.

1880-82 Future U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt attends Columbia Law School. Roosevelt did not graduate; it was not unusual at the time for men to receive some training at law school and then “read the law” at a firm. His distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, will also attend Columbia Law School for training in 1907.

1884 Charles Evans Hughes graduates. He will become governor of New York, U.S. secretary of State and a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

1890-91 After a long battle with Columbia trustees, Dwight establishes a third year of law instruction, an idea that had been entertained since the mid-1860s. Supporters had been divided on the question of whether the third year should be required for a standard bachelor’s degree in law (as a J.D. was then called), or whether a higher degree, a masters in law, should be rewarded. The former group won. However, both groups believed that a third year allowed for a more in-depth teaching of current courses, as well as of additional courses, thus better preparing graduates.

1891: William A. Keener is appointed dean. A disciple of ’s Professor Christopher Columbus Langdell, Keener introduces the “case method” into the curriculum. While Dwight’s method of legal instruction focused on practice skills, memorization of treatises, and moot court exercises, Langdell’s approach emphasized the study of individual cases and inductive reasoning. Faculty and students who didn’t like the change left to form New York Law School.

1892-1898 Future U.S. Supreme Court justices Benjamin Cardozo and Harlan Fiske Stone attend the Law School, as does James Dickson Carr, the school’s first black graduate.

1893 A renewed interest in legal scholarship set in motion plans to reward an advanced law degree, based on a fourth year of study. In the past 20 years, the LL.M. class has doubled in size to approximately 225 students, who hail from dozens of countries.

1897 The Law School moves to a wing of Low Library on the Morningside Heights campus. It has four floors (from top to the basement): lecture rooms; faculty offices; reading room, student conference room, dean’s office; and library stacks, club room, and smoking lounge.

1901 The Columbia Law Review is founded. It replaces the Columbia Law Times, which ceased publishing in 1893. The Law Review today receives the third highest number of submissions of any law journal in the country. Its eight annual issues consist of about 25 articles chosen from 1,500 submissions. Columbia’s student editors now publish 14 journals, including the Columbia Journal of Gender & Law, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, and the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts.

1901 George W. Kirchwey is appointed dean. One of his missions is to procure larger quarters for the School. In 1906-07, Columbia is the largest law school in America with 1,050 students. The cornerstone for Kent Hall, the new building, is laid in 1909. Because the study of law is expanding so rapidly, the building will suffer growing pains by the 1940s.

1910 Harlan Fiske Stone becomes dean, and continues his Wall Street practice.

1911 The Legislative Research Drafting Fund (LDRF) is established to improve the drafting of national, state and local laws under the direction of Joseph Chamberlain. The LDRF, which employs students in its research and drafting projects, takes on legislative problems of public importance, often at the request of legislative committees and executive agencies. In its early days, the LDRF addressed legislation involving, for example, child welfare laws, while today the fund’s interests include the environment, government policy in public health, and the implications of scientific advances.

1923 -1925 Future New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and Paul Robeson, an African-American singer, actor and activist, graduate from Columbia Law School. Huger Jervey ’10, a professor of international law, replaces Dean Stone, who is appointed U.S. attorney general by Calvin Coolidge.

1924 Charles Evans Hughes is elected president of the American Society of International Law (ASIL). The Law School has continued to provide leadership to the ASIL. Professors James Scott , Philip Jessup, Oscar Schachter ’39, Louis Henkin, and Jose Alvarez have all served as president.

1920s Professors Karl Llewellyn, Herman Oliphant and others put Columbia on the cutting edge of legal study, creating an informal group of legal realists who begin to revamp the curriculum. Their belief was that law must be taught in conjunction with the social sciences if it is to remain relevant. Their work, revealed in a groundbreaking study published in 1928, transformed growing areas of law such as trade regulation, taught by Milton Handler ‘26, and corporations, taught by Adolf Berle. Handler’s casebook on trade regulation still bears his name (along with current Professor Harvey Goldschmid ’65) and remains required reading for law students. Berle’s book, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, was groundbreaking when first published in 1932 and remains relevant to this day.

1927 After a long debate, Columbia admits its first woman student. In later decades, the number of women in Columbia’s entering classes trickles in, but begins to truly ascend in the 1970s, when the first tenured female professor (and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 is appointed to the faculty. In 1987, women represent 45 percent of the class, and they finally outnumber men with the Class of 2003, 51 percent to 49 percent.

1928: Columbia Law School’s legal realists meet resistance when they suggest that the Law School should be reorganized as purely a community of scholars and thus devote no time to training students to be lawyers. The Great Debate, as it was known, sunders the faculty. After it is decided that Columbia will both pursue scholarship and train lawyers, several professors depart, among them Oliphant and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas ’25.

1928 Young B. Smith, appointed dean, continues to move the Law School into the modern age with new courses dealing with contemporary problems. Many of these courses address the emergence of areas of legal regulation – commonly known as public law or administrative law – unprecedented in complexity and scope. The need for lawyers versed in administrative law rose dramatically with the Depression, when Congress created numerous agencies to regulate employment, banking, labor relations, and other areas. Among the nation’s leading experts in administrative law was Professor Walter Gellhorn ’31, whose seminal 1941 casebook on the subject remains in print today, with current professor Peter Strauss as co-editor. Professor Herbert Wechsler’s contribution to administrative law would be in the area of criminal law, culminating in the release in 1962 of the Model Penal Code, under the aegis of the American Law Institute.

1928-29 Columbia Law School establishes an entrance exam to improve the quality of the student body and decrease the drop-out rate. Twenty years later, the Law School, led by Professor Willis L.M. Reese, approached the College Entrance Examination Board with the idea of developing and administering a new entrance exam, which would be used by Columbia and other law schools. The test, called the LSAT, does its work, though selectivity was also aided by increasing number of people applying to law schools. In 1968, the Law School took 33 percent of applicants. Today, the figure stands at approximately 15.8 percent of J.D. candidates.

1930s Columbia Law School sends a large number of faculty and graduates to Washington, D.C., to work for FDR’s New Deal and with other government agencies. Among them are professors Thomas Reed Powell (Emergency Board on the National Railway Strike), Adolf Berle (member of the “brain trust” and special counsel to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation), Milton Handler ‘26 (general counsel, National Labor Board), William O. Douglas (chairman, Security and Exchange Commission), Noel Dowling (General counsel of Agricultural Adjustment Administration), John Hanna (Farm Credit Administration), Roswell Magill (assistant to the secretary of the treasury, and Herbert Wechsler (special assistant to the U.S. attorney general. Among alumni were Simon Rifkind ‘25 (as legislative secretary to Senator Robert F. Wagner, he helped draw up several New Deal legislative measures) and Stanley Reed ’07 (solicitor general).

1931 Columbia Law School continues its leadership in international law with the founding of the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law. Edwin Parker had been a member of the Mixed Claims Commission to settle claims arising from World War I and had found that young Americans assigned to his staff knew little about other systems of law.

1944 A course wholly unique to Columbia Law School called Legal Method is created, after it was decided that plunging students into study of many fields of law was inefficient. The intensive, three-week class today is called Legal Methods, though its goal remains the same: to teach first- year students how to go about the study of law.

1945-50 Dozens of Columbia-trained lawyers and Columbia Law professors serve at the Nuremburg trials. Among them were William J. Donovan ‘07, wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services, and Telford Taylor, who joined the faculty in 1962 and left his voluminous papers on the trials to the Law School.

1946 The Law School offers an accelerated curriculum to handle the tremendous influx of war veterans, who make up nearly three quarters of the class matriculating in 1946.

1950 With Kent Hall bursting from the seams, development plans begin for new building.

1953 William C. Warren, a tax lawyer invited to teach at Columbia in 1948, is appointed dean.

1958 The Law School celebrates its centennial. Guests include U.S. Supreme Court justices William Douglas and Stanley Reed, graduates of the Law School.

1960 Jerome Greene Hall is completed and the Law School moves into its new home at Amsterdam Avenue and 166th Street. The building was designed by architect Max Abramowitz, whose most prominent work includes the United Nations Headquarters building, Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, and the U.S. Steel Tower in Pittsburgh.

1964 Professor Herbert Wechsler successfully argues the pivotal First Amendment case New York Times v. Sullivan before the U.S. Supreme Court.

1968 In the wake of student protests on the Columbia campus, the faculty vote to give exams, but with PASS and INCOMPLETE scoring only, not letter grades. A Law School News poll finds that a majority of law students are against the occupation of academic buildings.

1970 Professor Michael Sovern is elected dean. He serves until 1979, when he becomes University Provost. Later, he will serve as University President.

1970 Changes in curriculum include clinical seminars to enhance legal training. As of 2008, the Law School has nine clinics.

1972 Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 is appointed the first full-time female faculty member and Kellis Parker is named the first full-time black faculty member. Both will also be the first minority candidates to earn tenure.

1975 The Center for Law and Economics is founded, the first of many centers and programs now housed at the Law School.

1976 This year marks the first use of a legal computer databases system in the library: The first Lexis terminals are installed.

1977 Bellerophon Taming Pegasus, the second largest sculpture in , is installed amid much fanfare on Revson Plaza.

1979 Professor Albert Rosenthal, an expert in environmental and constitutional law, is elected dean.

1980 The Law School launches the Center for Japanese Legal Studies, symbolizing the School’s leadership in the burgeoning field of Asian law.

1982 The Wien Prize for Social Responsibility is established to honor attorneys who put their resources and legal skills to work for the public good. It is named after philanthropist Lawrence Wien ’27.

1984 Columbia Law School establishes the Human Rights Internship Program, through which students do public interest work in the and around the world.

1984 Benno Schmidt, a constitutional law scholar, is elected dean.

1985 The Loan Repayment Assistance Program (LRAP) is established with a gift from George Jaffin. LRAP helps graduates who work in public interest law to pay back their loans.

1986 Professor Barbara Black ‘55, a legal historian, is elected dean, the first woman dean of an Ivy League law school.

1986 The Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts is founded under the leadership of IP pioneer Professor John Kernochan ’48. With the advent of the Internet and other forms of technology, intellectual property law grows in importance and, among students, in popularity. Columbia and the Kernochan responded to change with new courses, a clinic, and the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts. At present, the Law School has eight faculty members who devote all or at least some of their work to IP law.

1989 The Foundation Curriculum for 1Ls is established.

1991 Harvard Law School employment law professor Lance Liebman becomes dean.

1993 Columbia Law School celebrates former professor and alumna Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s ’59 appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

1993 Columbia Law School establishes a 40-hour pro bono requirement for all students.

1993 The Center for Public Interest Law is founded and becomes the focal point for the School’s public service programs.

1994 The Law School establishes a student exchange program with law schools in Japan, the first of many that soon allow students to also study in Paris, and Jerusalem, among other cities.

1995 Ground is broken for a $12 million renovation to Jerome Greene Hall to create a building with badly needed public spaces, growing programs and technology.

1996 David Leebron, a specialist in international trade and human rights law, is elected dean.

1998 The European Legal Studies Center is founded.

1998 Columbia Law School celebrates the end of its capital campaign after having raised $140 million, exceeding the goal by $15 million.

2000 The Diamond Library, named after real estate developer and benefactor Arthur W. Diamond ‘26, acquires its one millionth volume.

2000 The Human Rights Institute is founded. It builds on Columbia Law School’s long tradition in the study of human rights.

2000 Professors James Liebman and Jeffrey Fagan release A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases 1973-95, a highly influential report on capital punishment in America

2000 William & June Warren Hall on Amsterdam and 115th Street is dedicated by Mr. and Mrs. June Warren. Shared with Columbia University’s Business School, it contains classrooms, administrative offices and offices for a variety of student services.

2000 Columbia Law Review, one of the nation’s leading legal journals, celebrates its 100th anniversary.

2001 A gift from the Jerome L. Greene Foundation funds the renovation and upgrading of classrooms. Greene ’28 was a real estate lawyer and philanthropist.

2001 Columbia Law School mourns the loss of three alumni in the 9/11 attacks.

2002 Columbia celebrates the 75th anniversary of women at the Law School.

2003 Lenfest Residence Hall opens on Amsterdam Avenue at 121st Street, thanks to a gift from benefactors H.F. (Gerry ‘58) and Marguerite Lenfest.

2003 The Transactional Studies Program, which brings real-world deal-making into the classroom through simulation exercises and small groups, is founded.

2004 Columbia holds a yearlong celebration to commemorate its legacy in Brown v. Board of Education on the decision’s 50th anniversary. Among those who participate are the Hon. Robert L. Carter ’41 LL.M., the Hon. Constance Baker Motley ’46, Professor Jack Greenberg ’48, the Hon. Jack Weinstein ’48 (who all participated in the trial work), Mrs. Thurgood Marshall and former President Bill Clinton.

2004 David Schizer, a tax law scholar, is elected 14th dean of the Law School.

2005 The James Milligan Scholarship Fund is established in memory of Milligan’s 25 years as dean of admissions.

2006 The Law School celebrates the legacy of human rights professor Louis Henkin.

2006 The Law School launches a $300 million capital campaign.

2007 The Law School sets a fundraising record of $37 million in fiscal year 2006-07.

2007 Seven new full-time professors with expertise in terrorism, national security, human rights law, international economics, criminal law, elections law and other issues shaping the future of domestic and international public law join Columbia Law School’s world-class faculty this 2008 academic year. The seven hires, a record for the Law School, continue Dean Schizer’s strategic initiative to increase the Columbia Law School faculty by 50 percent.