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30 Cornell L. Q. 488 (1944-1945)
Law Schools The Law Reviews and the Courts

handle is hein.journals/clqv30 and id is 524 raw text is: THE LAW SCHOOLS, THE LAW REVIEWS AND THE COURTSf LYMAN P. WILSON It is trite to say that we are in the midst of a great social upheaval and that we are now in a period of intense readjustment of our social philosophies. And it is a naive mistake to think of this process as a new phenomenon, just as it is a mistake to speak of the depression of the nineteen-thirties as a new experience and to call it the greatest depression the world has ever seen. It was the, greatest that we had ever experienced, and we followed a very natural human tendency when we substituted our experience for the records of history. In precisely the same way, many highly vocal persons are today referring to our present upheaval as though it were something new or anom- alous, when it is but a normal process, that from time to time has recurred ever since man first attempted to construct an organized society. More than thirty years ago, Dean Roscoe Pound pointed out that we were then entering upon one of these periods of social change, which miark the beginning or an end.of a social epoch, and that this one promised to rival the age of Coke and to surpass that of Mansfield. One must be a poor scholar indeed if he does not today recognize the accuracy of that prediction. If the present period of readjustment is to be understood one must have in mind the mechanics of social change-the hitching forward of social institutions. We did not'arrive at the'present state of our society by any steady process of evolution. Social developments seem never to have come that way. It would be more accurate to say that the history of organized society is marked by alternating periods of rest and feverish readjustments. Man is a peculiar animal. He is, to a greater degree than most of us would be willing to admit, a creature of habit. He finds it much easier to continue to do things as he has become accustomed to doing them than to ch-ange to more efficient ways. He boasts that an all-wise Creator has endowed him above all the other animals; that he has been given the power to reason. Yet he still finds it easier to believe than to think, easier to accept ready-made ideas from books, from the press, from the radio and from persuasive speakers than to seek out the facts and from those facts to reach reasoned conclusions of his own. It is perhaps inaccurate to call this attitude of mind an intel- lectual inertia, or to label it with the harsher name laziness. But whatever jAn address given.before the Judicial Section of the New York State Bar Association in New' York City, on January 20, 1945.

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