Editing Juris Doctor (section)

===Legal training in colonial North America and 19th-century United States===

Initially there was much resistance to lawyers in colonial North America because of the role they had played in hierarchical England, but slowly the colonial governments started using the services of professionals trained in the Inns of Court in London, and by the end of the [[American Revolution]] there was a functional bar in each state.<ref name="Moline-2003" />{{rp|page=775}} Due to an initial distrust of a profession open only to the elite in England, as institutions for training developed in what would become the United States they emerged as quite different from those in England.<ref name="Stein-1981" />{{rp|page=429}}

Initially in the United States the legal professionals were trained and imported from England.<ref name="Stein-1981" />{{rp|page=438}} A formal apprenticeship or clerkship program was established first in New York in 1730 — at that time a seven-year clerkship was required, and in 1756 a four-year college degree was required in addition to five years of clerking and an examination.<ref name="Stein-1981" />{{rp|page=439}} Later the requirements were reduced to require only two years of college education.<ref name="Stein-1981" />{{rp|page=439}} But a system like the Inns did not develop, and a college education was not required in England until the 19th century, so this system was unique.

The clerkship program required much individual study and the mentoring lawyer was expected to carefully select materials for study and guide the clerk in his study of the law and ensure that it was being absorbed.<ref name="Moline-2003" />{{rp|page=781}} The student was supposed to compile his notes of his reading of the law into a "[[commonplace book]]", which he would try to memorize.<ref name="Moline-2003" />{{rp|page=782}} Although those were the ideals, in reality the clerks were often overworked and rarely were able to study the law individually as expected. They were often employed to tedious tasks, such as making handwritten copies of documents. Finding sufficient legal texts was also a seriously debilitating issue, and there was no standardization in the books assigned to the clerk trainees because they were assigned by their mentor, whose opinion of the law may have differed greatly from his peers.<ref name="Moline-2003" />{{rp|page=782, 783}}

It was said by one famous attorney in the United States, [[William Livingston]], in 1745 in a New York newspaper that the clerkship program was severely flawed, and that most mentors
: "have no manner of concern for their clerk's future welfare ... [T]is a monstrous absurdity to suppose, that the law is to be learnt by a perpetual copying of precedents".<ref name="Moline-2003" />{{rp|page=782}}
There were some few mentors that were dedicated to the service, and because of their rarity, they became so sought-after that the first law schools evolved from the offices of some of these attorneys, who took on many clerks and began to spend more time training than practicing law.<ref name="Moline-2003" />{{rp|page=782}}

[[File:Tapping Reeve.jpg|right|thumb|[[Tapping Reeve]], founder of the first law school in North America, the [[Litchfield Law School]], in 1773]]

In time, the apprenticeship program was not considered sufficient to produce lawyers fully capable of serving their clients' needs.<ref name="Sonsteng-2007">
{{cite journal
 |last=Sonsteng |first=J.
 |orig-year=2007
 |url=http://ssrn.com/abstract=1084098 |type=abstract
 |title=A legal education renaissance: A practical approach for the twenty-first century
 |journal=William Mitchell Law Review
 |volume=34 |number=1 |pages=13–19
 |date=2 April 2008 <!-- date text was revised -->
 |access-date=26 May 2008
}}
</ref>{{rp|page=13}} The apprenticeship programs often employed the trainee with menial tasks, and while they were well trained in the day-to-day operations of a law office, they were generally unprepared practitioners or legal reasoners.<ref name="Stein-1981" /> The establishment of formal faculties of law in United States universities did not occur until the latter part of the 18th century.<ref name="Stein-1981" />{{rp|page=442}} With the beginning of the American Revolution, the supply of lawyers from Britain ended. The first law degree granted by a United States university was a Bachelor of Law in 1793 by the [[College of William and Mary]], which was abbreviated LB; Harvard was the first university to use the LLB abbreviation in the United States.<ref name="Kirkwood-Owens-c2012">
{{cite report
 |first1=M.  |last1=Kirkwood
 |first2=W.  |last2=Owens  |name-list-style=amp
 |date=n.d.
 |title=A Brief History of the Stanford Law School, 1893–1946
 |publisher=[[Stanford University]]
 |department=[[Stanford University|S.U.]] School of Law
 |url=http://www.law.stanford.edu/school/history/historysls.pdf
 |access-date=26 May 2008
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120407053200/http://www.law.stanford.edu/school/history/historysls.pdf
 |archive-date=7 April 2012
}}
</ref>

The first university law programs in the United States, such as that of the [[University of Maryland School of Law|University of Maryland]] established in 1812, included much theoretical and philosophical study, including works such as the Bible, [[Cicero]], [[Seneca the Younger|Seneca]], Aristotle, Adam Smith, [[Montesquieu]] and [[Grotius]].<ref name="Moline-2003" />{{rp|page=794}} It has been said that the early university law schools of the early 19th century seemed to be preparing students for careers as [[politician|statesmen]] rather than as lawyers.<ref name="Moline-2003" />{{rp|page=795}} At the LLB programs in the early 1900s at [[Stanford University]] and [[Yale]] continued to include "cultural study", which included courses in languages, mathematics and economics.<ref name="Kirkwood-Owens-c2012" />{{rp|page=19}} An LLB, or a Bachelor of Laws, recognized that a prior bachelor's degree was not required to earn an LLB.

In the 1850s there were many proprietary schools which originated from a practitioner taking on multiple apprentices and establishing a school and which provided a practical legal education, as opposed to the one offered in the universities which offered an education in the theory, history and philosophy of law.<ref name="Sonsteng-2007" />{{rp|page=15}} The universities assumed that the acquisition of skills would happen in practice, while the proprietary schools concentrated on the practical skills during education.<ref name="Sonsteng-2007" />{{rp|page=15}}

====Revolutionary approach: scientific study of law====
[[File:Joseph Story.jpg|thumb|[[Joseph Story]], United States Supreme Court Justice, lecturer of law at Harvard and proponent of the "scientific study of law"]]
In part to compete with the small professional law schools, there began a great change in United States university legal education. For a short time beginning in 1826 Yale began to offer a complete "practitioners' course" which lasted two years and included practical courses, such as pleading drafting.<ref name="Moline-2003" />{{rp|page=798}} United States Supreme Court justice [[Joseph Story]] started the spirit of change in legal education at Harvard, when he advocated a more "scientific study" of the law in the 19th century.<ref name="Moline-2003" />{{rp|page=800}} At the time he was a lecturer at Harvard. Therefore, at Harvard the education was much of a trade school type of approach to legal education, contrary to the more liberal arts education advocated by Blackstone at Oxford and Jefferson at William and Mary.<ref name="Moline-2003" />{{rp|page=801}} Nonetheless, there continued to be debate among educators over whether legal education should be more vocational, as at the private law schools, or through a rigorous scientific method, such as that developed by Story and [[Christopher Columbus Langdell|Langdell]].<ref name="Stein-1981">{{cite journal
 |first=Ralph Michael
 |last=Stein
 |year=1981
 |url=http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/lawfaculty/228/
 |title=The Path of Legal Education from Edward to Langdell: A History of Insular Reaction
 |journal=Chicago-Kent Law Review
 |volume=57
 |issue=2
 |pages=429–450
 |access-date=25 May 2008
 |archive-date=3 March 2021
 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210303194828/https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/lawfaculty/228/
 |url-status=live
 }}{{rp|page=445}}</ref>{{efn|For detailed discussions of the development of [[Christopher Columbus Langdell|C.C. Langdell's]] method, see la&nbsp;Piana (1994)<ref name=la-Piana-1994>
{{cite book
 |first=William P. |last=la&nbsp;Piana
 |year=1994
 |title=Logic and Experience: The origin of modern American legal education
 |place=New York & Oxford
 |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]
 |url=https://www.questia.com/read/90428553?title=Logic%20and%20Experience%3a%20The%20Origin%20of%20Modern%20American%20Legal%20Education
 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090506183208/http://www.questia.com/read/90428553?title=Logic%20and%20Experience%3A%20The%20Origin%20of%20Modern%20American%20Legal%20Education
 |url-status=dead
 |archive-date=6 May 2009
 |via=
}}
</ref> and Stein (1981)<ref name=Stein-1981/>{{rp|pages=449–450}}
}} In the words of Dorsey Ellis, "[[Christopher Columbus Langdell|Langdell]] viewed law as a science and the law library as the laboratory, with the cases providing the basis for learning those 'principles or doctrines' of which law, considered as a science, consists.{{' "}}<ref>
{{cite journal
 |last=Ellis |first=D.
 |year=2001
 |title=Legal education: A perspective on the last 130&nbsp;years of American legal training
 |journal=Washington University Journal of Law & Policy
 |volume=6 |page=166
}}
</ref> Nonetheless, into the year 1900, most states did not require a university education (although an apprenticeship was often required) and most practitioners had not attended any law school or college.<ref name="Moline-2003" />{{rp|page=801}}

Therefore, the modern legal education system in the United States is a combination of teaching law as a science and a practical skill,<ref name="Moline-2003" />{{rp|page=802}} implementing elements such as clinical training, which has become an essential part of legal education in the United States and in the JD program of study.<ref name="Sonsteng-2007" />{{rp|page=19}}