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27 J. Legal Education 382 (1975-1976)
Secularization of American Legal Education in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, The

handle is hein.journals/jled27 and id is 390 raw text is: JOURNAL OF LEGAL EDUCATION THE SECULARIZATION OF AMERICAN LEGAL EDUCATION IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES HAROLD J. BERMAN * This is a rather pompous title, and I think I should apologize for it. Actually, I have a very simple point to make, which is that the seculariza- tion of legal education has had deleterious effects on legal education. I do not have a scholarly paper to present, but propose rather to preach a kind of sermon-which may not be entirely inappropriate on a Sunday morning. It is important that we at least be conscious of the fact that legal edu- cation in the West (by which I mean primarily Europe and those coun- tries, like America, which are heirs to the Western legal tradition) al- ways had a very important religious dimension until the nineteenth century. In America, it was the rise of university law schools in the late 19th century that eliminated the religious dimension of legal educa- tion. By legal education in the Western tradition, I have in mind, to start with, the beginning of legal education in the late eleventh century at Bologna and at the other European universities which were established thereafter, when, for the first time, law came to be studied as a separate discipline, that is, separate from theology and separate from rhetoric. The method of law study which was adopted at that time was the same method that was used in the study of philosophy and theology, which also became separate disciplines for the first time in the medieval uni- versities of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, namely, the so-called scholastic method. The scholastic method was a method of harmonizing contradictions in the light of an ideal body of principles or general truths derived from a sacred text. In law, this involved the presupposition that there is a divine law-a law of creation, a law of the universe-and also a moral law, a natural law, by which all human law is to be tested. The university jurists also added the concept of an ideal human law, the Roman law, found in the rediscovered law books of Justinian. To- gether with the Bible, the writings of the Church fathers, the decrees of the Church councils and popes, the writings of Aristotle and other sacred texts, these law books of Justinian provided a set of basic principles for criticizing and evaluating existing legal rules and legal institutions. It * Story Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. 382 [VOL. 27

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