UNIVERSITY TEACHING OF ENGLISH LAW. 171 thirteen colonies before the Declaration of Independence. . . . Upon all questions of private law, at least, this work stood for the law itself throughout the country, and . . . exercised an influence upon the jurisprudence of the new nation which no other work has since enjoyed." ^ This great result, it should be observed, was the work of a young enthusiast in legal education, a scholar and a University man, who had the genius to see that English law was worthy to be taught on a footing with other sciences, and as other systems of law had been taught in the Universities of other countries. Blackstone's example was immediately followed here, and was soon further developed in the form which he had urged upon the authorities at Oxford, but urged in vain, — that of a separate college or school of law. In 1 779, the year after Blackstone had published the eighth and final edition of his lectures, and only a year before his death, a chair of law was founded in Virginia, at William and Mary College, by the efforts of Jefferson, then a visitor of the insti- tution ; and in the same year Isaac Royall of Massachusetts, then a resident in London, made his will, giving property to Harvard College for establishing there that professorship of law which still bears his name. In 1790, Wilson gave law lectures at the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania. The Litchfield Law School, established about 1784, was not a University school ; yet if it be true, as is not improbable, that it was the natural outgrowth of an ofifice over- crowded with students, it may well be conjectured that Black- stone's undertaking chiefly shaped and sustained it. At any rate his lectures appear to have been the chief references of the instructors at Litchfield. Hammond, in referring to a collection of verbatim notes of lectures at the Litchfield school in 18 17, representing, as he conceives, " the exact teaching " of the profes- sors of that time, says *' that the references to Blackstone not only outnumber those of any other book, but may be said to outnumber all the rest together." ^ In England little progress was made for a century. Blackstone's plan for a law College at Oxford was not carried out, and he re- signed, disappointed, in 1766. The conservatism of a powerful profession, absorbed in the mere business of its calling, itself untrained in the learned or scientific study of law, and unconscious of the need of such training, did not yield to or much consider the ^ I Hammond's Blackstone, ix. ^ Ibid x., note.
