Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School in the United States

Harvard Law School is one of the graduate colleges of the Harvard University. The Harvard University is the oldest of U.S. educational institutions. Its law school is the oldest continually-operating one in the country (the University of Maryland School of Law was chartered a year before; however, it did not begin classes until 1824). It is also known as Harvard Law or HLS. Harvard Law School is established in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Harvard Law School Library

It is the second largest library at Harvard and the world’s largest academic law library collection, with more than 2 million volumes. By collecting from every national jurisdiction in the world, this Harvard facility has accumulated one of the world’s great international and foreign law library collections. The Harvard Law School Library has an extensive and exceptional collection of rare books, manuscripts and art. A recent extensive renovation of Langdell Hall, the Harvard Law School Library’s principal home, has created for the students and faculty a technologically modern and comfortable facility for research and study.

Other Harvard libraries

According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the “university library is the largest college library in the country, and from its slow and competent selection is of exceptional value. In 1908 it numbered, including the various special libraries, 803,800 bound volumes, about 496,600 pamphlets, and 27,450 maps. Some of its collections are of great value from associations or special richness, such as Thomas Carlyle’s collection on Cromwell and Frederick the Great; the collection on folk-lore and medieval romances, supposed to be the largest in existence and including the material used by Bishop Percy in preparing his Reliques; and that on the Ottoman empire. The law library has been described by Professor A. V. Dicey of Oxford as “the most perfect collection of the legal records of the English people to be found in any part of the English-speaking world.” There are department libraries at the Arnold arboretum, the Gray herbarium, the Bussey Institution, the astronomical observatory, the dental school, the medical school, the law school, the divinity school, the Peabody museum, and the museum of comparative zoology.”

History of Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School was established in 1817.

From the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica:

“In 1636 the General Court of the colony voted £400 towards “a schoale or colledge,” which in the next year was ordered to be at “New Towne.” In memory of the English university where many (probably some seventy) of the leading men of the colony had been educated, the township was named Cambridge in 1638. In the same year John Harvard (1607-1638), a Puritan minister lately come to America, a bachelor and master of Emmanuel college, Cambridge, dying in Charlestown (Mass.), bequeathed to the wilderness seminary half his estate (£780) and some three hundred books; and the college, until then unorganized, was named Harvard College (1639) in his honour. Its history is unbroken from 1640, and its first commencement was held in 1642.”

The charter of 1650

“The charter of 1650 has been in the main, and uninterruptedly since 1707, the fundamental source of authority in the administration of the university. It created a co-optating corporation consisting of the president, treasurer and five fellows, who formally initiate administrative measures, control the college funds, and appoint officers of instruction and government; subject, however, to confirmation by the Board of Overseers (established in 1642), which has a revisory power over all acts of the corporation. Circumstances gradually necessitated ordinary government by the resident teachers; and to-day the various faculties, elaborately organized, exercise immediate government and discipline over all the students, and individually or in the general university council consider questions of policy. The Board of Overseers was at first jointly representative of state and church. The former, as founder and patron, long regarded Harvard as a state institution, controlling or aiding it through the legislature and the overseers; but the controversies and embarrassments incident to legislative action proved prejudicial to the best interests of the college, and its organic connexion with the state was wholly severed in 1866. Financial aid and practical dependence had ceased some time earlier; indeed, from the very beginning, and with steadily increasing preponderance, Harvard has been sustained and fostered by private munificence rather than by public money.”

University Control

“The last direct subsidy from the state determined in 1824, although state aid was afterwards given to the Agassiz museum, later united with the university. The church was naturally sponsor for the early college. The changing composition of its Board of Overseers marked its liberation first from clerical and later from political control; since 1865 the board has been chosen by the alumni (non-residents of Massachusetts being eligible since 1880), who therefore really control the university. When the state ceased to repress effectually the rife speculation characteristic of the first half of the seventeenth century, in religion as in politics, and in America as in England, the unity of Puritanism gave way to a variety of intense sectarianisms, and this, as also the incoming of Anglican churchmen, made the old faith of the college insecure. President Henry Dunster (c. 1612-1659), the first president, was censured by the magistrates and removed from office for questioning infant baptism.

The conservatives, who clung to pristine and undiluted Calvinism, sought to intrench themselves in Harvard, especially in the Board of Overseers. The history of the college from about 1673 to 1725 was exceedingly troubled.

Increase and Cotton Mather, forceful but bigoted, were the bulwarks of reaction and fomenters of discord. One episode in the struggle was the foundation and encouragement of Yale College by the reactionaries of New England as a truer “school of the prophets” (Cotton Mather being particularly zealous in its interests), after they had failed to secure control of the government of Harvard. It represented conservative secession. In 1792 the first layman was chosen to the corporation; in 1805 a Unitarian became professor of theology; in 1843 the board of overseers was opened to clergymen of all denominations; in 1886 attendance on prayers by the students ceased to be compulsory. Thus Harvard, in response to changing ideas and conditions, grew away from the ideas of its founders.

In organization and scope of effort Harvard (grew), especially after 1869, under the direction of President Charles W. Eliot, to be in the highest sense a university; but the “college” proper, whose end is the liberal culture of undergraduates, continued to be in many ways the centre of university life, as it is the embodiment of university traditions. The law school (dates) from 1817.”

Grading

Like other few law colleges (for example, Yale and Stanford), the Harvard Law School has a system of alternate grading, which gives less emphasis (or no emphasis at all) on rank.

HLS Publications

The HKS law periodicals are:

About other publications

In 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica: ” In 1878 the library published the first of a valuable series of Bibliographical Contributions. Other publications of the university (apart from annual reports of various departments) are: the Harvard Oriental Series (started 1891), Harvard Studies in Classical Philology (1890), Harvard Theological Review (1907), the Harvard Law Review (1889), Harvard Historical Studies (1897), Harvard Economic Studies (1906), Harvard Psychological Studies (1903), the Harvard Engineering Journal (1902), the Bulletin (1874) of the Bussey Institution, the Archaeological and Ethnological Papers (1888) of the Peabody museum, and the Bulletin (1863), Contributions and Memoirs (1865) of the museum of comparative zoology. The students’ publications include the Crimson (1873), a daily newspaper; the Advocate (1831), a literary bi-weekly; the Lampoon (1876), a comic bi-weekly; and the Harvard Monthly (1885), a literary monthly. The Harvard Bulletin, a weekly, and the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine (1892), a quarterly, are published chiefly for the alumni.”

Radcliffe College

“Radcliffe College, essentially a part of Harvard, dates from the beginning of systematic instruction of women by members of the Harvard faculty in 1879, the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women being formally organized in 1882. The present name was adopted in 1894 in honour of Ann Radcliffe, Lady Mowlson (ob. c. 1661), widow of Sir Thomas Mowlson, alderman and (1634) lord mayor of London, who in 1643 founded the first scholarship in Harvard College. From 1894 also dates the present official connexion of Radcliffe with Harvard. The requirements for admission and for degrees are the same as in Harvard (whose president countersigns all diplomas), and the president and fellows of Harvard control absolutely the administration of the college, although it has for immediate administration a separate government. Instruction is given by members of the university teaching force, who repeat in Radcliffe many of the Harvard courses. Many advanced courses in Harvard, and to a certain extent laboratory facilities, are directly accessible to Radcliffe students, and they have unrestricted access to the library.” (source: the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica).

See Also

Further reading

  • History of the Harvard Law School and of Early Legal Conditions in America, by Charles Warren. New York: Lewis Publishing Company, 1908. Three volumes.
  • The Harvard Law School, 1817-1917, by Harvard Law School Association, 1917 – 164 pages.
  • Kahlenberg, Richard D. (1992), Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School, New York: Hill and Wang
  • The Law at Harvard: A History of Ideas and Men, 1817-1967, by Arthur E. Sutherland. Belknap Press, 1967 – 408 pages
  • Granfield, Robert (1992). Making Elite Lawyers: Visions of Law at Harvard and Beyond. New York: Routledge.
  • Seligman, Joel. The High Citadel: The Influence of Harvard Law School (1978). 262 pp.
  • Bentinck-Smith, William, ed. The Harvard Book: Selections from Three Centuries (2d ed.1982). 499 pp.
  • Bethell, John T.; Hunt, Richard M.; and Shenton, Robert. Harvard A to Z (2004). 396 pp.
  • Bethell, John T. Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, 1998
  • Hall, Max. Harvard University Press: A History (1986). 257 pp.
  • Hoerr, John, We Can’t Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard; Temple University Press, 1997, ISBN 1-56639-535-6
  • Howells, Dorothy Elia. A Century to Celebrate: Radcliffe College, 1879–1979 (1978). 152 pp.
  • Keller, Morton, and Phyllis Keller. Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America’s University (2001)
  • Lewis, Harry R. Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (2006)
  • Morison, Samuel Eliot. Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636–1936 (1986) 512pp
  • Powell, Arthur G. The Uncertain Profession: Harvard and the Search for Educational Authority (1980). 341 pp.
  • Rosovsky, Nitza. The Jewish Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe (1986). 108 pp.
  • Sollors, Werner; Titcomb, Caldwell; and Underwood, Thomas A., eds. Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe (1993). 548 pp.
  • Trumpbour, John, ed., How Harvard Rules. Reason in the Service of Empire, Boston: South End Press, 1989
  • Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, ed., Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 337 pp.
  • Winsor, Mary P. Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum (1991). 324 pp.
  • Benjamin Peirce, A History of Harvard University 1636-1775 (Boston, 1883)
  • Josiah Quincy, A History of Harvard University (2 vols., Boston, 1840)
  • Samuel A. Eliot, Harvard College and its Benefactors (Boston, 1848);
  • H. C. Shelley, John Harvard and his Times (Boston, 1907);
  • The Harvard Book (2 vols., Cambridge, 1874);
  • G. Birkbeck Hill, Harvard College, by an Oxonian (New York, 1894);
  • William R. Thayer, “History and Customs of Harvard University,” in Universities and their Sons, vol. i. (Boston, 1898);
  • Official Guide to Harvard, and the various other publications of the university; also the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine (1892 sqq.).

Harvard Law School

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