Education: Inn at S. M. U.

The U.S. has never had anything quite like London’s tradition-laden Inns of Court.* The Inns are not only professional societies which have the power to admit lawyers to the bar, or ban them. They are also schools where law students mingle with practicing lawyers, share their common rooms, libraries, dining halls, listen to their shoptalk. Last week, this idea in legal education found its way to Texas in the form of a new $2,500,000 Southwestern Legal Center at Southern Methodist University.

Top U.S. jurists (among them: Supreme Court Justices Jackson and Clark, Judge Harold Medina, the whole Texas supreme court) were on hand for the opening ceremonies, and there was plenty for them to see.

The new center is housed in bright, new buildings, unlike its London counterparts with their secluded courtyards, but it is otherwise designed to achieve the same result of giving law students the benefit of practicing lawyers’ experience. Lawyers from all over the U.S. will come to stay at the center, to teach, do research work, attend forums and legal clinics. Like their London colleagues, they will live with the? students (the center has rooms for 75 students, special suites for the visiting lawyers), talk over the problems of legal practice in & out of class. One S.M.U. building contains a model courtroom and a replica of an up-to-date lawyer’s office, where students will give free advice to needy citizens. The center boasts three libraries, one for general law, one for international law, and one for oil and gas law, a Texas specialty that might startle many a Lincoln’s Inn bencher.

The idea behind the center came to Texas via Manhattan. Arthur T. Vanderbilt, now New Jersey’s chief justice, first proposed the plan for an American “Inn” in 1946, while he was dean of New York University’s Law School. The present S.M.U. Dean Robert Storey frankly admits borrowing the idea, was raising money for his center before N.Y.U. had even, finished plans for its own.

If the center lives up to Storey’s expectations, it will be one of the foremost legal laboratories in the U.S. “Here,” says Dean Storey, “we can begin to study what is wrong and what is right with our laws.”

* So called because the four Inns—Gray’s, Lincoln’s, the Inner and Middle Temples—once furnished lodgings for their members. Francis Bacon was a “bencher”‘ (senior member), and Thomas More, Thackeray, Pitt, Burke and Disraeli all attended the Inns.