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REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON LEGAL EDUCATION.

Your committee, to which was referred at the last annua! meeting of the Association, the report of the then Committee on Legal Education, respect fully report:

That early in the spring the chairman communicated by letter with each member of the committee, in order to ascertain as definitely as was possible, in that way, the views of the members upon the recommendations of the last committee embodied in its report.

The result of this correspondence indicated an apparent disposition of the members, without adopting the report as a whole, to concur fully in the first recommendation of that report, and also in the substantial principle of the second recommendation, though there was some diversity or opinion as to the character and extent of the preliminary education and examination which was proposed, and some question as to the method of conducting such examination.

Later, a meeting of the committee was held, at which were present six of the nine members, and where there was a full and careful discussion of the whole subject and an interchange of opinion, the unanimous conclusion being the recommendation of the following changes in the existing law regulating admission to the Bar in the State:

I. No one shall be examined for admission to the Bar who shall not have studied the law in a Law School in any part of the United States, or in the office of a member of the Bar of this State for the period of at least three years.

2. Every applicant for admission to the Bar, if he be a graduate of any college or high school in this State, shall file with his petition for leave to take the examination for admission to the Bar, a duly authenticated certificate of the fact and date of such graduation; and if the applicant

be not a graduate of such college or high school, he shall submit to a preliminary examination by the Superintendent of Public Schools of the City of Baltimore, if he reside in said city, or by the Superintendent of Public Schools of the county in which he resides, and he shall file with his said petition a certificate under the hand and seal of such Superintendent that he has carefully examined such applicant (stating the date of such examination) with a view to his application for admission to the Bar, and that he has been found fairly acquainted with the meaning and use of English words; with the rules of English grammar, and with the rules for the construction of prose sentences in English; that he can write legibly and spell correctly, and that his education is substantially equivalent to a high school education in Maryland.

Your committee also recommend that the incoming Committee on Legal Education be authorized and requested to prepare and present to the next legislature, a bill to carry into effect the above recommendations and to urge the enactment into law.

Referring briefly, in inverse order, to the two recommendations made, every member of the committee felt the desirableness of requiring some evidence of more thorough rudimentary English education. There can be no hardship in enforcing this requirement in Maryland at this time. The public schools are maintained at a very heavy cost to the State, the City of Baltimore and the counties, and are kept open ten months in each year. As a rule they are conducted by competent and faithful instructors. All necessary books and adjuncts are furnished free of cost to pupils or parents. It is in the power of every boy of ordinary capacity, and industry to acquire, even in the country schools, a thoroughly respectable English education. If he aspires to any learned profession, his neglect to avail himself of this privilege ought to be evidence of his unfitness for such profession. This we understand to be the opinion of the

State Bar Examiners, founded upon their experience in that office, and there can be none better qualified than they to form a correct judgment upon that question.

As to the three-year law course, that is already the plan of the Law Schools in this State, though they have permitted it to be completed in two years.

Seventeen of the States require three years actual study of the law and the trend throughout the country is in that direction.

Apart from these considerations, our territorial expansion in distant regions, the application of new agencies and methods to our industries, and the increasing difficulty in reconciling the respective rights and interests of capital and labor are creating political and social problems whose just and peaceful solution will continue to tax to the utmost the resources of statesmanship. Only trained thinkers are real statesmen and the law is perhaps the greatest of all schools for the special mental training of public men. A mere knowledge of the system and body of law taught in a law school or in law offices, however fully mastered, is not so valuable to the student as the early development of the thinking and reasoning faculties, which enable one to continue his education through life, and to grapple with great questions in any field of thought, and your committee is led to believe that an additional year of this mental training would be fruitful in results, and would amply compensate for delayed admission to the Bar.

There has been suggested the desirability of furnishing the examiners some more positive and satisfactory evidence than is now afforded of the good moral character of applicants for admission, and of the maintenance of such character for some fixed period after admission, but we have not been able to make any practical suggestions with this view.

A distinguished lawyer has said: "The rectitude of the Bench means the rectitude of the Bar." He was ther

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speaking of the Supreme Court of the United States where, probably, the character of the Bench is more largely than elsewhere a reflection of the character of its Bar. We think, however, it would be more accurate, as a general proposition to say: "The rectitude of the Bar means the rectitude of the Bench;" an upright, high-minded Bar could not fail to detect, and would not tolerate a corrupt judge; but the Bar has a hundred opportunities, where the judge has one, of discovering a corrupt practitioner, and we believe its protection against unworthy members discovered after admission, is best left to its own fearlessness and sense of duty acting through its present instrumentalities.

JAMES A. PEARCE, Chairman.

William S. Bryan, Jr.: I move that the report be accepted and filed.

The motion was duly seconded, and after vote was declared carried.

The President: The next business in order is the report of the Committee on Grievances. Mr. Bartlett is not here today, but he will be here tomorrow. I understand there is really nothing to report, and if it is the will of the Association, the submitting of the report can be passed until tomorrow.

Thomas Foley Hisky: I move that the report be passed.

The motion was duly seconded, and after vote was declared carried.

The President: The next business in order is the report of the Committee on Legal Biography.

The Secretary: Mr. Williams is not able to be here at this time to make this report, and has asked me tɔ submit it for him.

REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON LEGAL BIOGRAPHY.

The Committee on Legal Biography herewith submits biographies of the following members of the Maryland Bar:

Hon. Thomas J. Morris, United States District Judge. John Wirt Randall, of Anne Arundel County.

Daniel M. Thomas, of Baltimore City.

John F. Williams, of Baltimore City.

Respectfully,

GEORGE WEEMS WILLIAMS,

Chairman.

THOMAS J. MORRIS.

Thomas J. Morris, late senior United States District Judge. for the District of Maryland, was born in Baltimore, September 24, 1837, and died at his home in Baltimore on June 6, 1912.

Judge Morris' father was John Morris, and his mother was before marriage Miss Sarah Chancellor. His preliminary education was received at the Medfield School, conducted by John Prentiss in the suburbs of Baltimore. He entered Harvard College and was graduated in 1856; later he studied law in the Harvard Law School. After the completion of his course at Harvard he continued the study of law in the office of Hinkley & Morris, a firm comprised of the late Edward Otis Hinkley and the late John T. Morris, a first cousin of Judge Morris. He was admitted to the Bar of Baltimore City, November 19, 1860, and shortly afterwards became a member of the firm of Hinkley

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