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Dec 30, 2014 · When did law schools become such a fixture in the training of elite Americans? Writing in the American Bar Association Journal in 1978, Mark T. Flahive says it happened quite suddenly, when the US was just emerging as an independent nation.
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A law school in the United States is an educational institution where students obtain a professional education in law after first obtaining an undergraduate degree. Law schools in the U.S. confer the degree of Juris Doctor (J.D.), which is a professional doctorate. [1]
The history of law offers indispensable insights into the character of our legal systems. Historical materials appear throughout the Law School’s curriculum with specialized courses addressing topics in the history of legal systems around the world.
- The Early Days: 1853-1869
- The Move to Baton Rouge and Surviving Reconstruction: 1869-1886
- The Downtown Campus and World War I: 1886-1918
- The Greater University: 1918-1940
- World War II and Postwar Growth: 1941-1964
- Boom and Bust: The 1960s to The 1990s
- The Flagship University: The 1990s and Beyond
Louisiana State University began as a small all-male military school near Pineville, Louisiana. Originally called the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy(or variations thereof), classes began on January 2, 1860. The first superintendent, William Tecumseh Sherman, and five faculty members, taught the first students. The Seminar...
The move to Baton Rouge was supposed to be temporary, but the school remained at the Institution for the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind for eighteen years. The Seminary occupied half of the large building while inmates of the institute used the remainder. Throughout Reconstruction in the 1870s and into the 1880s, LSU continued to struggle financially and wa...
Although LSU was the sole occupant of the Institution for the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind, it did not own the building. Since the Seminary was destroyed by fire in 1869, several groups from central Louisiana had wanted the school to return to Rapides Parish, but there was never enough support in the legislature to construct new buildings or rebuild the o...
By 1918, LSU was experiencing growing pains and President Thomas Boyd began looking for land to build a new and larger campus. For several years, Boyd had his eye on Gartness Plantation south of Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River, thinking that the land would provide enough space for the university’s physical growth and further its agricultura...
During World War II, LSU became a major center for the Army Specialized Training Program and was one of the Army’s top providers of officers. Student population decreased from a high of 7,500 in 1941 to around 3,400 by 1944 because so many student-age men were off at war. In 1944, women students outnumbered men for the first time and they began to ...
The 1960s and 1970s saw many changes in student life on campus. A new spacious student union was completed in 1964 that provided meeting and gallery space, a theater, and dining facilities. The union replaced cramped facilities in the Huey Long Fieldhouse and the Gym-Armory (now the Cox Academic Center for Athletes). The passage of the Civil Rights...
By the late 1990s, LSU had begun to recover from the setbacks that began in the 1980s and became a land, sea, and space-grant university with a diverse student body that numbers around 30,000. Yearly budget cuts beginning in 2008 brought about changes in the administrative structure and as in the 1980s, some low-enrollment courses were eliminated. ...
The Litchfield Law School’s greatest influence was in shaping future legal education in the United States. Reeve distinguished the study of the law as based upon general principles and methods, and upon a national level, not as they pertained to specific states.
The Law School’s legal history program also continues to grow and evolve; NYU is one of the few law schools today to offer non-US legal history. The core law and history faculty include Daniel Hulsebosch, Noah Rosenblum, and William Nelson ’65. Hulsebosch specializes in imperial legal history.
Legal history matters. Legal history sits at the cross-roads between disciplines. Its study enriches our understanding of both past societies and our own. We ask how law changes. How have the rules that govern our lives developed? How have they been resisted? How have they been changed? Studying legal history also opens our eyes to alternatives.
