COLUMBIA LAW SCHOOL AT 150: A TIMELINE Oct. 4, 1858 Columbia Law School 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 Francis Lieber 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 New York 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 Harvard Law School’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.