Education: Too Many Sourbellies?

Dick the Butcher: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Jack Cade: Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man? . . .

Shakespeare, King Henry VI.

Columbia University’s Law School, among the nation’s best, asked itself: are there too many lawyers? Answer: not yet, but at this rate there soon will be.

To make up for men who missed out by going to war, Columbia will handle 750 law students each year, but hopes to cut back to its normal quota of 500 by 1951. Even with an expanded enrollment, the law school must reject hundreds of applicants. Before the war, Columbia took in one out of two; now it turns down three out of four. So do Michigan, Cornell and other overcrowded law schools.

Observes Columbia’s Law Dean Young B. Smith, eyeing the G.I. Bill of Rights uneasily: “A university is under the obligation to give general education to as many as possible, but the professional schools ought not to train more than the profession can absorb. [A glut of lawyers] creates unemployment and frustrated desires. . . . It would be mistaken patriotism to train too many. . . . A disappointed lawyer is just smart enough to make trouble for everybody. He is likely to become a sourbelly and a revolutionary.”