[2] However, the holder of this position would be the sole purveyor of legal education for the institution, and would give lectures designed to supplement, rather than replace, an apprenticeship.
[3] Even as a handful of law schools were established, they remained uncommon in the United States until the late nineteenth century.
Most people who entered the legal profession did so through an apprenticeship which incorporated a period of study under the supervision of an experienced attorney.
[4] The scholastic independence of the law student is evident from the following advice of Abraham Lincoln to a young man in 1855: If you are absolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself the thing is more than half done already.
Byrnes was followed by Robert H. Jackson, who was commissioned just three days later, on July 11, 1941, and had also been admitted to the practice of law by reading, although he had attended Albany Law School for less than one year, taking a two-year program in a single year to save money.
[23] In 2021, Kardashian said she had failed her first-year law exam, the "baby bar," for a second time, performing "slightly worse" than her first attempt earlier in the year.
[24] Except for the second chief justice John Rutledge, who had formal legal education at the Middle Temple in London, no chief justice had any university-based legal training until Melville Fuller in 1888, who attended Harvard Law School for six months.
7 of the first 8 U.S. Supreme Court chief justices engaged in their legal education primarily by reading law.