DONOR LUCE

# The Luce Chair

## A New Link between School and College and Law and Laymen

The night before Commencement, 1833, a courteous gentleman with striking features, an aquiline nose, small clothes and silk stockings talked to the Yale Community about Chancellor Kent, his *Commentaries* and the wide realms of law. The speaker was Judge David Daggett, one of the founders of the Yale Law School. The event: the establishment of the James Kent Professorship of Law in Yale College.

What the Kent Professorship meant was recognition on a permanent basis of the principle that law at Yale was more than technical training for lawyers but was also a branch of the humanities, an integral part of higher learning important to the general cultural development of free citizens. Even then—in 1833—the notion of acquainting undergraduates with the broader aspects of the law was not novel at

Yale. For Daggett—who suggested the name for the chair—had been lecturing on legal subjects in the College without compensation since 1826. Earlier, Elizur Goodrich had been a Professor of Law in the College from 1801 to 1810. And before the American Revolution was over, Yale President Ezra Stiles was urging that Yale start its development as a university by establishing chairs in medicine and in law. Instruction in law, he felt, was vital not only for training members of the profession, but for the education of “civilians,” whose legal training would teach them to love and to protect liberty.

For nearly 100 years, the program started by Daggett—the teaching of law by Law School professors to the men in the College—was in sporadic operation at Yale. But by 1921, the fifth and last holder of the Kent chair

## The Value of the Law

"Law is a matter of rules and regulations—often we think too many. But law is first of all a matter of basic fundamental principles. If American leadership, responding to the educated intelligence of the American people, can succeed in making clear a few basic principles, to which the American people can give serious assent, and which can be asserted in all our international relations—that will be the turning point in this most dangerous hour of history."

Henry R. Luce
Occidental College Address, 1954

OCCUPANT BLACK

—William Howard Taft—had vacated that position. A great link—tangible evidence of Yale Law School's long interest in law for the non-lawyer—a link between the Law School and the College—was broken.

## Tradition Revived

One day last spring that link was put in place again. A new chair was established to revive the tradition of the Kent Professorship, emphasizing the place of law in a liberal education, and the meaning of law in its relation to responsible, democratic citizenship. Its name: the Henry R. Luce Professorship of Jurisprudence, made possible by the gift of Mr. Luce, Editor-in-chief of Time, Life and Fortune magazines and a 1920 graduate of Yale College and intended to stimulate a better understanding of law among laymen. Said Dean Rostow as the gift was announced:

"The imaginative gift of Mr. Luce makes possible a most important step in the evolution of the Law School's program. It should encourage first class scholarship in the field of legal philosophy, and the revival at Yale of an old and valued tradition, which made a broad view of law, as the essential organizing principle of society, part of the knowledge of well-educated laymen. In a time of rapid and sometimes turbulent social change, law cannot safely be left entirely to the lawyers. A liberal education should include the study of law as a social institution, and as a body of principles."

## Double Purpose

The idea of the Luce chair—like the earlier Kent Chair—was to establish a bridge between the School and the College. As to teaching by a Law professor in the College, the purpose was twofold: to those in the College who would take the course and later enter law school, it would pro-

vide a lasting humanistic orientation and sense of balance to them as technicians; to those who would later pursue non-law goals, it would give some insight into the processes of law, and enable them to feel, notwithstanding their lack of technical proficiency, that these processes were comprehensible to them. The man selected to fill that assignment was former Columbia University Law Professor, Charles Lund Black, Jr., a 1943 graduate of the Yale Law School.

Teaching Introduction to Public Law and Admiralty, Texan Charles Black is concentrating on courses in the Law School this term. In February his first attempt to give College men an understanding about what lawyers and courts are doing will be realized with the initiation of a course affiliated with the undergraduate departments of Political Sciences, History, Sociology, and labelled "Jurisprudence 30B: Law in Our Society."

As the new Luce Professor explains it, the emphasis on the College course will "be placed on the consideration of law as human activity, directed toward fulfillment of man's needs and ideals, and on the interrelations between law and other disciplines studying man." Black's proposed four phases of the course include: (1) a brief introduction; (2) a survey of the judicial mechanisms, so that the student's knowledge of legal procedure is not limited to what he learns from fiction and the motion pictures; (3) an attempt to give some insight into the way lawyers' minds work—how they go about “finding” the “facts” and the law;—and (4) a relation of the judicial mechanisms and the working of the legal mind to the problems of society.

## The Teacher

The new Luce Professor is just back from a summer in Europe, where he lectured on the American Legal System and Civil Liberties in the United States at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. After graduating from Yale, he served in the Army Air Force and later practiced law in New York with the firm of Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Sunderland and Kiendl, before joining the Columbia Law faculty in 1947.

Mr. Black is now chairman of the legal committee of the Association of American Indian Affairs, and has been a member of the legal committee of the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People. He has written widely in professional journals, and has a Trea- sise on Admiralty Law, written with Professor Grant Gilmore, in press.

When Professor Black opens his new course next year, the tradition that Judge Daggett began 123 years ago will again be a reality at the Yale Law School—thanks to the new Henry R. Luce Professorship of Jurisprudence.

YALE LAW REPORT—26