Harvard Law's Appeal

The Harvard Law School makes a masterful statement today of its aims and hopes for the future. The concepts of public service which it expresses, the ambition to share greatly in the maintenance of American legal principles and in their effective adaptation to changing conditions, are, to be sure, in no wise new to the school. Ever since its foundation, the Harvard School of Law has taken leadership in the training of law years for able service not alone of private clients, but of the public interest. Of late, however, the school has seen opportunities of usefulness rising before it with freshly forceful insistence, as in the case of the much-needed reform of American administration of criminal justice. In the urgency of such calls, it has found new courage to make open appeal for the funds required to answer them, and we are glad that it has done so. Every dollar of that portion of the five millions of new endowment which is to go for research will help achieve for the American people values inestimably larger than their cost in money.

Important though the work of research is which Harvard desires to undertake in the several fields of law and of American legal institutions, we do not believe that the straight forward "day to day" needs of the school itself will have any less force of appeal to prospective donors. More than ever as the practice of law grows more complicated, and as the number of law schools increase which but poorly prepare their pupils to deal with these complications in an efficient way, the country's need of great and thoroughly adequate law schools increases. In the Harvard Law School the Nation has such an institution today, one of the best in the United States, one of the best in the world. It is important to keep it so, and to grant it every facility which will enable it to remain so. Boston Transcript.