SOCIAL ENGINEERING

A significant experiment in legal and business education is being conducted by the Yale Law School in cooperation with the Harvard Business School. With the inevitable arrival of the public control of business and the destined growth of such control there has and will arise an even greater demand for expert legal advice to create a mechanism that will have a smooth and adequate legal apparatus and to insure its proper functioning. Already the lawyer is overwhelmed with problems concerning the legality of financing methods and the intricacies of modern corporate devisements.

Realizing the imminent necessity of facing this change, the Yale school has attempted to broaden the classical curriculum to include practical study of social changes in relation to the law. Instead of being confined to case precedents, the new study will attempt to find the causes and effects of the case, the actual circumstances from which the legal problem arose. Dean Clark has expressed the hope that the new plan will not merely be useful as vocational training. "The dream is that this will result in real gain in scientific knowledge and in methods of control of our intricate social organization." How successful and useful the combination of legal and business education given by experts will be cannot now with certainty be prophesied. It does, however, set out boldly to accomplish a desired goal by practical means.

The trend is clearly toward the education of lawyers in the tradition of the Continent by adopting in some measure the curricula of its law schools which are broad enough to train sociologists and political scientists as well as lawyers. In thus seeking to adapt its instruction to the necessities of the age, the Yale Law School evidences a flexibility of program which should aid its development in the future. It is a process the parent institution in Cambridge might do well to watch.