University of Pennsylvania Law School - History

History

The University of Pennsylvania Law School officially traces its origins to a series of lectures delivered in 1790 by James Wilson, a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution. Following this early beginning, Penn began offering a full-time program in law in 1850, under the leadership of George Sharswood, an innovator in legal education. Under Sharswood's leadership, Penn Law created what has become the template for modern legal education: a combination of lectures in law with practical experience for students. In 1852 Penn Law was the first law school in the nation to publish a law journal still in existence, then called The American Law Register, which was later renamed to the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, one of the most-cited law journals in the world.

The School entered a new era when William Draper Lewis was named dean in 1896. Lewis aspired to put Penn Law in the first rank of law schools in the country. He convinced the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania that the school needed to move to a new building, and in 1900, the new Law School building (now Silverman Hall) opened in its present site on the Penn campus with its massive Georgian structure of brick and limestone with ornamental details throughout. It was at the time considered the largest structure devoted solely to legal education in the country. Under Lewis' deanship the law school was also one of the first schools to emphasize legal teaching by full-time professors instead of practitioners, a system that is still followed today. As legal education became more formalized the School initiated a three-year curriculum and instituted stringent admissions requirements. While the School continued to accept students that did not hold a bachelor's degree, it warned applicants that " large number of those who study law are college graduates; and those who are not cannot hope, except in rare instances, to compete successfully with the college man."

After completing almost 30 years within the ranks of the law school, Lewis eventually devoted his powers to founding the American Law Institute, in 1925, which was seated in the law school and was chaired by Lewis himself. The ALI was later chaired by another of Penn Law's Deans, Herbert Funk Goodrich. Two years before Goodrich was named Dean, the law school graduated with a J.D. Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (in 1927), the first African-American woman to ever receive a Ph.D. in the United States (also from the University of Pennsylvania, in economics). The first woman to join the faculty was Martha Field in 1969, now a professor at Harvard Law School, while the first black woman to join the faculty was Regina Austin (in 1977) who is still teaching at Penn.