We had orientation last week and I've already met my students and spoken with them some, so I feel like school's begun. But today is the official start of school here; the beginning of my -- yup, that's grey hair I see in the mirror, along with less hair in general -- of my seventeenth year in this business. In celebration of this, I thought I'd start the year off with something about legal education....
I've written about University of Virginia Law Professor James P. Holcombe before -- in the context of a scary mid-term examination. Now it's time to talk about his 1853 address to the University of Virginia alumni. I'm mostly interested in it for Holcombe's ideas about slavery, which I'll spare you at this moment (he looms large in University, Court, and Slave) -- but one of the things that I also find interesting is his talk of the need to hire recent graduates to teach at UVA (he called them lecturers, but I'm modernized his term for purposes of the title of this post). It would offer them the chance to get some writing done!
The crowning recommendation of this scheme arises from its tendency to form a class of authors, and thus to prove the nursery of a native literature. It has been shown by ancient as well as modern experience that nothing qualifies a man to write upon a subject like teaching it. Adam Smith tells us that except a few poets, orators and historians, the greater part of the men of letters of Greece and Rome were public or private teachers, and that this was true from teh days of Lysias and Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle, down to those of Plutarch and Epicteus, Suetonius and Quinctillian.
And so good luck to everyone with the start of school--students, faculty, faculty candidates (you, especially, have been on mind of late). This'll be a very exciting semester, I'm sure. In property I'm looking forward to Johnson v. McIntosh today and The Antelope tomorrow.
The image of the University of Virginia's rotunda is from the Library of Congress' Historic Buildings Survey.
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