Law School's Vanguard Of Registrants Starts Off Roll Toward Peak Total

First wave of a probable record total for the Law School, which will number slightly over 2200 students next September, files through registration lines in the Court Room today and tomorrow with a predicted figure of 580 men.

This vanguard contingent is all sixth and seventh term men, who will be followed next Monday and Tuesday by third and fourth termers, respectively. Men in their fifth term bring up the rear a week from Friday.

Enrollment limitations in certain final year courses were given as the reason for the unique scattered system of registration by William J. Bowe, assistant secretary of the Law School, yesterday.

Names No Names

"But I'd rather not say just what those courses are," he declared. "Put it in print and we'd only exaggerate the lopsided situation we will come up with anyway."

Men on the verge of their degree or with a single term to complete. Bowe explained, had to be given the first crack at the high priority courses. The eligibility of the fifth-termers for the same material is a kink left over from three term per annum wartime acceleration.

No man, Bowe hastened to add, will be denied opportunity to enter a course that will be unavailable to him at a later phase of his grind towards a lawyer's shingle. The registration procedure merely calls for postponement, and not the elimination, of the selections of the fifth term man.

Large Incoming Crop

Helping to swell the student population to almost double its size in its last prewar year are the 550 new entrants who register on September 19, Livingston Hall, vice dean, disclosed yesterday.

With 1,521 students now in the school, and with a mere 78 departing at the end of the current term, they will be seven short of the 2000 mark this year without considering those returning from leave of absence and special graduate students.

Forty of the latter, many from foreign lands, are expected when the final fall count is taken, and 175 are expected back from temporary absences.

Prior to the swollen enrollments of the Law School at war, the number of students from the middle 'thirties on showed a downward trend from the peak year of 1936-37 a checkback yesterday showed. At this point the total was 1,498.

But except for a slight rally in the 1938-39, a continued decline persisted to the nadir of 1,249 at the time when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.