Columbia Library columns (v.27(1977Nov-1978May))

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  v.27,no.3(1978:May): Page 4  



4                                  Richard B. Morris

dure. The Columbia Law School Library possesses a splendid
example of the latter attributed to Joseph Murray, a New York
lawyer of the 1730s and 1740s. Such famous Patriot lawyers as
Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and John Jay all kept common¬
place books, and Alexander Hamilton's practice manual in printed
form served succeeding generations of lawyers.

It must be remembered that on the eve of the Revolution there
was no place where one could undertake the systematic study of
the common law. Englishmen and some affluent Americans might
attend the Inns of Court in London, but the quality of instruction
in those institutions had sadly declined by the eighteenth century,
and their advantages were perhaps more social than intellectual.
Few New York families, including the Jays, who however did
investigate the possibility, could afford the expense of maintain¬
ing a son for five years at one of the Inns of Coutt. At least ;C4°o
a vear might be involved. Most New York attorneys secured their
training in local law offices, where their parenrs paid the practi¬
tioner a handsome fee for virtually ignoring their offspring. Since
law office training in the pre-xerox era involved laborious copying
of writs and pleadings, of wills and deeds, and lacked systematic
or comprehensive guidance, it is understandable that, following
admission to the Bar, some intellectually alert lawyers would
organize a project for what we would today call post-graduate
education.

That need was behind the organization of the Moot, whose first
session, according ro the minutes, was held on November 23, 1770.
It is at this meeting that the society framed its by-laws. Modeled
after the Moot of Gray's Inn, London, its rules barred social
events, an implied criticism of the largely social functions that
charactetized contemporary English law societies. Of the sev¬
enty some lawyers then practicing at the New York City Bar, rhe
eighreen charter members of rhe Moot constituted a close-knit
elite of older established lawyers and a number of young lawyers
who had been accepted into the fold, all admitted to practice at
  v.27,no.3(1978:May): Page 4