Learning the Law, Or Not

THERE ARE THREE IVY LEAGUE universities which do not have law schools. They are Dartmouth, Brown, and Princeton. Princeton established a law school briefly in 1852, which lasted only until 1855. It was closed due to lack of funding. In 1935 another try was made to establish a school of law at the prestigious university, but failed again, when a suitable, qualified faculty was unable to be found and hired. It seems that places like Harvard and Yale, among many others, had already swept up all the available legal professorial talent, were paying them well, and weren't about to relenquish their high qualified, esteemed lecturers in the law to any upstart new law school. In 1974, the matter was once again brought up for consideration, but the decision was made to "table" the project, to indefinitely postpone it, and there the matter rests, fifty years later, on the table, or under it, gathering dust,while far lss prestigious institutions of higher education go merrily ahead with their long standing schols of law, supplying this nation's rather substantial litigation requirements. One third of all attorneys at law in the world are Americans, in what is beyond dispute the most litigious society on Earth. When I was a kid, in the nineteen sixties, I accepted without question the fact that women werent allowed to enroll in Ivy League universities, nor serve in the military in anything other than support roles,nor enroll in the service academies, and that African-American student athletes were, essentially, non existant. Discrimination against minorities and women was the norm. I believe it was 1971 when Harvard and Yale began admitting women. "Coeds" they were called, and at about that same time African-American football and basketball players were allowed to compete, for the first time, on varsity sports teams in the south. Ironic, that it was prestigious schools like Harvard and Yale which were the most belated in admitting female students. Not so surprising is that black athletes started taking the field in the south later than in the rest of the country. When in nineteen sixty six an all white University of Kentucky basketball team lost the national championship game to an all black Weatern Texas (UTEP now) team, heads turned. The 1964 national football champion Arkansas Razorbacks were lilly white, as were the runner up Alabama Crimson Tide. Also, college and professional teams in that era featured offensive and defensive linemen who weighed anyhere from just over two hundred pounds, to a whopping two fifty. Anybody heavier than that was considered a freak of nature. When a high school classmate of mine enrolled at the University of Arkansas, in 1973, the Razorback football team had a handful of black players. He came home on Christmas vacation calling the team the "Razorblacks". The "backwards" characteristics of society I took for granted, glady watching all white football games on television as a child. Had desegration never happened, I have no idea how long it would have taken me to see segregation and discrimination as a great evil, if ever. I do reacall that in 1965, when I was ten, my favorite football players were Jim Brown and Gale Sayers, and my favorite basketball player was Wilt Chamberlain, all black athletes. Perhaps I was at least a bit ahead of my peers in the deep south. I hope so. Things have changed, a lot, rather recently. And maybe we in the American south were late to the table in terms of racial equality, but we admitted female students to our universities far earlier than the vaunted Ivy league institutions, and, well, if nothing else, we have had law shools at nearly all of our universities in the south for decades. At the Uinversity of Arkansas, the first African-American law school student, Silas Hunt, was admitted in 1948, rather early, but was required to sit alone in a box in the corner of lecture halls. That too changed, when demanded by professors. Backwards though we might still be down here, at least we have law schools.