Reform for New York

To the University of Chicago's still-youthful President Robert Maynard Hutchins, 38, the most characteristic feature of the modern world is bewilderment. This bewilderment he would attack with a return to reason. To him the university is the place of all places to grapple with those fundamental principles which rational thought seeks to establish. Too much of education, he says, is based on the false notion that education is a substitute, instead of a preparation, for experience. Of legal education he says: "To tell a law student that the law is what the courts will do and have him reach his conclusions on this point by counting up what they have done is to forego rational analysis, to deny the necessity of principles, and to prevent the exercise of the intellect."

Last week in Manhattan, with no impunity except his own brilliance, Chicago's Hutchins shredded the complacency of nearly 1,000 members of the New York State Bar Association with an indictment of the limited notion lawyers have of their profession. Then, with equal candor, he propounded his philosophy of law on which he built a program for legal education. Then he dared the Bar really to reform legal education. His dramatic appeal did not come kindly to all the listening legalists in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom, but they voted him an honorary member of their Bar in admiration of his eloquence.

President Hutchins is a lawyer by training. He believes that lawyers and educators interested in training lawyers must reconstruct legal education so as to achieve a learned profession and the common good. He would train lawyers to practice for the welfare of the community and not as a means of making money. Legal education as he would provide it would train student lawyers thus: P:To search for and order knowledge relevant to legal problems. C. To know the methods of legal analysis.

P:To know how to refer legal questions to principles in moral and political philosophy.

P:To be able to formulate legislation and to interpret legal language.

P:To argue and present proof of matters

of fact.

P:To be versed in casuistry.

Of his curriculum Educator Hutchins said: "Not the study of cases alone, nor the study of how the law operates.in fact, nor the study of legal philosophy will give us legal education. We must have all three [and] jurisprudence is the ordered relation of all these studies."

Then Educator Hutchins issued his challenge: "The Bar has enthusiastically opposed successive reforms in legal education and has accepted them only when it was beginning to be clear that these reforms had missed the point. I cannot hope that the program I have advanced will meet with the favor of the Bar. It contains all the things they have opposed in the past and a good many more that they have never had a chance to oppose before."

Huckster's Trade. Educator Hutchins was not the only reformer to speak last week to the New York Bar. A speaker who "conceded that the prestige of the legal profession has been rapidly sinking in the public mind during the past quarter of a century" was the only salaried "proctor of the Bar" in the U. S. He is Karl A. McCormick, 50, of Buffalo, N. Y., whose job as watchdog of the Western New York judicial district was created last year by the New York Legislature to check the qualification of Bar candidates, investigate charges of unethical and illegal practices.

Proctor McCormick started with a warning: "Unless we ... become conscious of our most vital problems and set about to solve them immediately, the time is not far distant when the profession of the law will have degenerated to a huckster business or else some violent change will do away with it entirely."

Prime problems he named were: 1) overcrowding of the Bar; 2) propaganda of lay agencies seeking to take away the lawyer's business; 3) the attitude of the individual lawyer toward his profession.

Since there are no precedents for Proctor McCormick to follow, he wants his job to develop slowly, lead the way for other Bar proctors. He is most interested in advising youths who want to study law. His plan is to keep track of as many high school and college students as he can, find out whether all that want to should go into law, "discover" others who have not thought of it. So far, most "business" in Proctor McCormick's office has come from laymen who think their lawyers charge too much.

Salary of the first proctor is $6,000 per year, with $4,000 for expenses and an assistant's salary. Funds come from the lawyers of the district who conceived the post, selected Lawyer McCormick for it. Born in Medina, N. Y., Karl McCormick attended the University of Buffalo's School of Law (1909). He and his wife are crack bridge players, live on Buffalo's Chatham Avenue two blocks from where President William Mclvinley was shot.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.