DEAN WARREN A. SEAVEY

College of Law

AW schools, including Nebraska's, are in the second stage of their development. Beginning as mere assistants to practicing lawyers in the education of candidates for the bar, they have come to be the sole normal means by which specific legal education is acquired. As a professional training school, the College of Law will progress, not by increasing its size, unless the population of the state warrants an increase, but by improving the quality of its work. Higher entrance requirements, a dormitory in which the students by constant, close association will stimulate and develop each other, an increased faculty to give more personal contact between student and instructor, a gradually expanding library, a more complete articulated course of study---these will all help to enable it to do a better teaching job.

   The next stage of its development will be reached when the school becomes the scientific research bureau of the state for legal affairs. Law instructors are today the only body of men with the knowledge, inclination and time to work out with any degree of completeness the underlying policies and principles of the law. The judges and the busy practitioners get close-up views of specific situations, but with the multitude of new conditions and new demands upon the law created by the complexity of modern life, they are unable to do the exhaustive, scholarly, and scientific work required in analyzing and harmonizing substantive law and its application to life. This work, it would appear, must be done largely by teachers; it has already been started and this school has entered upon it in a modest way. In time this will become a co-ordinate function of the school. The College of Law will then be one of the chief pillars in the temple of justice.

 

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