Columbia Law School (CLS) is the law school of Columbia University, a private Ivy League university in New York City.
The school was founded in 1858 as the Columbia College Law School. The university is known for its legal scholarship dating back to the 18th century. Graduates of the university's colonial predecessor, King's College, include such notable early-American legal figures as John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, and Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, who were co-authors of The Federalist Papers.
Columbia Law has many distinguished alumni, including United States presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; ten justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, making it the only law school to have graduated more than one Chief Justice; numerous U.S. Cabinet members and presidential advisers; US senators; representatives; governors; and more members of the Forbes 400 than any other law school in the world.
History
Background
The teaching of law at Columbia University reaches back to the 18th century. Graduates of the university's colonial predecessor, King's College, included such notable early American judicial figures as John Jay, who would become the first chief justice of the United States. Columbia College appointed its first professor of law, James Kent, in 1793. The lectures of Chancellor Kent in the course of four years had developed into the first two volumes of his Commentaries, the second volume being published November 1827. Kent did not, however, succeed in establishing a law school or department in the college. Thus, the formal instruction of law as a course of study did not commence until the middle of the 19th century.Theodore W. Dwight, "Columbia College Law School, New York," 1 Green Bag 141 (1889)
Founding
The Columbia College Law School, as it was then officially called, was founded in 1858. Classes were originally held on Colonnade Row in a building once owned by John Jacob Astor. Approximately half of Colonnade Row still exists, but the portion occupied by Columbia Law School was demolished in 1902.
The first purpose-built law school building was a Gothic Revival structure located on Columbia's Madison Avenue campus, which also housed the college library. Thereafter, the college became Columbia University and moved north to the neighborhood of Morningside Heights. As Columbia Law Professor Theodore Dwight observed, at the founding of the formal course of study in law, the demand for it was still speculative:
It was considered at that time mainly as an experiment. No institution resembling a law school had ever existed in New York. Most of the leading lawyers had obtained their training in offices or by private reading, and were highly skeptical as to the possibility of securing competent legal knowledge by means of professional schools. Legal education was, however, at a very low ebb. The clerks in the law offices were left almost wholly to themselves. Frequently they were not even acquainted with the lawyers with whom, by a convenient fiction, they were supposed to be studying. Examinations for admission to the bar were held by committees appointed by the courts, who, where they inquired at all, sought for the most part to ascertain the knowledge of the candidate of petty details of practice. In general, the examinations were purely perfunctory. A politician of influence was not readily turned away. Few studied law as a science; many followed it as a trade or as a convenient ladder whereby to rise in a political career."
Indeed, Columbia Law School was one of the few law schools established in the United States before the Civil War. During the 18th and 19th centuries, most legal education took place in law offices, where young men, serving as apprentices or clerks, were set to copying documents and filling out legal forms under the supervision of an established attorney. In New York, John Jay, revolutionary Founding Father and first chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, read law with Benjamin Kissam, whose busy practice kept his clerks occupied in transcribing records, pleadings, and opinions. Jay was fortunate to have attentive supervision because the quality and time of learning the law varied greatly within the profession. Theodore Dwight, who had been head of the law department of Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, believed formal legal education, conducted in the classroom with regular lectures, was far superior to casual law office instruction.
At its founding, four distinct courses of lectures of this class were then established: one on Philology, offered by distinguished scholar and statesman, George P. Marsh; a second by Dr. Francis Lieber, a standard writer upon topics of political science and of international law, then a professor at Columbia College; a third course on Ethics, by Professor Nairne, also of the college; and a fourth on Municipal Law, by Theodore W. Dwight, then professor of Law in Hamilton College, New York, which at the time already had a flourishing law school. The original course of study to obtain a degree consisted of just two years, rather than the modern standard of three.
The first lecture in the law school was delivered on Monday, November 1, 1858, by Dwight, at the rooms of the Historical Society. It was an introductory lecture, afterwards printed. The audience consisted mainly of lawyers. It was plain that many of them could be counted upon as friends of a system of legal education. The result was an immediate attendance of 35 students, who showed their intention of pursuing a regular course of study by at once paying a tuition fee for instruction throughout the year. Such assurances were given of a future increase of numbers that it was determined to divide each class at the beginning of the coming year into two sections, for their convenience. The next year, the number of students was 62; in the third year, there were 103. Many of these early students were members of the bar.
In 1860, in order to stimulate excellence in attainments of the students, a series of annual prizes was established, commencing with $250, and diminishing regularly by $50, until the sum of $100 was reached. These were adjudicated by leading members of the bar upon the combined merits of written answers to printed questions, and of essays upon topics selected by the instructors. None could compete for the prizes except those who had fully completed the two years' course. The questions covered the range of studies for the whole course. Stringent rules were adopted in reference to the answers, so as to secure the absolute fidelity of the candidates in their work.
In 1882, George Henry Schanck graduated from Columbia Law as its first black student. There were a few other black students over the next several decades, including Thomas Ayres Church and James Dickson Carr.
Dwight Method
Professor Dwight believed a course of legal study should focus on the application of basic legal principles, as learned through the study of legal treatises, coupled with frequent moot courts which would permit students to demonstrate their proficiency in applying those principles to new legal problems. In this way, Dwight's method of teaching diverged significantly from the "case method" which had then been popularized by Dean Langdell of the Harvard Law School, which focused on the study of individual cases and the use of inductive reasoning to distill governing legal principles from those cases with little time spent on the practical application of those principles.
Dwight believed that his method was superior to the case method because it helped to create trained legal practitioners ready to enter the profession rather than academics more suited to teaching. In support of his position, Dwight cited the example of legal study throughout the Western World since the Roman empire: It is not out of place in this connection to refer to the chosen methods of acquiring the Roman law, both as sanctioned by great jurists and by imperial authority, after an experience continuing through centuries . . . The Roman jurists had "cases" to deal with, precisely as we do. They were not mere legal philosophers, but disposed of practical and "burning" questions of their time. They were, however, in the habit of referring back to a legal principle in disposing of a concrete case, and believed that great principles could be so stated as to win the attention of students and give them a solid basis for future detailed acquisitions.
By the late 19th century, Dwight's method gave way to the case method which by the turn of the 20th century had become the standard curriculum at all of the other premier American law schools at Harvard, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1891, in response to Columbia's adoption of the case method, Dwight and a number of other professors left the law school to found New York Law School in Manhattan's Financial District.
20th century After Dwight's departure, William Albert Keener of Harvard Law School became dean of the law school from 1891 to 1901 when he was succeeded by George Washington Kirchwey. Future Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone graduated from the law school in 1898. While practicing law in New York, he began lecturing at Columbia Law School in 1899 and joined the faculty as a full professor. He subsequently became dean of the law school in 1910 and held the position until 1923, when he left to join Sullivan and Cromwell as a partner. Stone became attorney general of the United States in 1924, and held that office for almost a year before joining the Supreme Court of the United States as an associate justice.
Columbia allowed women to enroll in 1927. In 1945, Elreta Alexander-Ralston became the first black woman to graduate from Columbia, followed the next year by Constance Baker Motley. Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated in 1959, and became the first tenured law professor at Columbia in 1972, as well as the second woman ever on the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the 1920s and 30s, the law school soon became known for the development of the legal realism movement. Among the major realists affiliated with Columbia Law School were Karl Llewellyn, Felix S. Cohen and William O. Douglas.
In September 1988, Columbia Law School founded the first AIDS Law Clinic in the country, taught by Professor Deborah Greenberg and Mark Barnes.
Academics
Centers Columbia University was among the first schools to establish both comparative and international law centers, as well as an effective space law department. The law school also has major centers for the study of international law, including the Center for Chinese Legal Studies, the Center for Korean Legal Studies, the Center for Japanese Legal Studies, the European Legal Studies Center, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, the Center on Corporate Governance, the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, the Center for Law and Economic Studies, the Center on Global Legal Transformation], as well as several other centers and law programs. In July 2012, the law school launched the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership to "study global financial markets and their diverse, interdependent actors"; the Center for Constitutional Governance to "bring together a dynamic roster of constitutional scholars who are deeply engaged in the study of governmental structure and relationships, including experts on separation of powers and issues of federalism"; and the Center for International Commercial and Investment Arbitration to "further the teaching and study of international arbitration, building on the Law School's considerable expertise in this rapidly growing area of legal practice."
Academic programs
Externships