Cue the Music...

I just happened across this article on the place of The Law School in the ecology of the legal system; it wants only stirring music to be suitable for broadcast on, say, Court TV, were Court TV more concerned with things that interest me, and less concerned with things that interest people who actually watch television. Anyway, I'm keeping this bookmarked, in case I ever begin to wander from the idea that the law is a noble profession.

A few nibbles from the article:

To my belief, the great law school, rightly planned and rightly manned, will be one of the mighty contributing agencies in improving the law, whether in legislation, in the practice of the profession, or in the procedure of administration.

and the author speaks of

the difference that separates judicial rules that are drawn from a sacred repository of the dead past and those that are inspired by the immortal spirit of the common law...

That there is just ground for the charge that the law is mediaeval is due to the very fact that too many of our lawyers and judges ... do not know when an old principle is dead and when a new principle is born; do not know the spirit of the common law; do not know that, through the hands of the judiciary, the common law can and should give protection to new conditions as they arise, and so constantly give birth to new legal rights.

And - an interesting historical note - the article brings up an early incarnation of the controversial "right to privacy." (...I'm sorry, I forgot... why is this controversial, again? Oh, yeah: because it's not explicitly mentioned in Holy Writ. I mean, the Constitution. And as we know, what is not expressly permitted is forbidden. Unless you take the Ninth Amendment seriously, that is.)

Some years ago Mr. S. D. Warren and Mr. Louis Brandeis published several articles in the Harvard Law Review, the object of which was to show that there existed, under a true interpretation of the common law, what might be called a right of privacy...

Why is this an interesting historical note? The article is actually the transcript of an address delivered at the dedication of the Boalt Memorial Hall of Law... in 1911.