Until well past 1850, the chief method of legal education in America was apprenticeship. In fact, many lawyers did not even have the benefit of such journeyman training. They, like President Abraham Lincoln, prepared themselves for the bar through self-directed reading. So, when the Western University of Pennsylvania (forerunner of the University of Pittsburgh) in the fall of 1843 announced classes in law at "thirty-seven and one-half dollars a term, payable in advance," it was embarking on a largely uncharted course.

That year, the University appointed Walter H. Lowrie (1807-1876), a professor of rhetoric and belle-lettres, to the newly instituted law professorship. The names of the handful of students enrolled in those first law classes are lost to history, but the Board of Trustees' minutes of 1847 tell us that Bachelor of Law degrees were conferred on James C. McKibben, Robert Finney, Matthew Stewart, and Matthew B. Lowrie (who may have been a relative of Professor Lowrie). These four men were the University's first law graduates.

In 1851 Walter Lowrie was elected to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and was later to serve as Chief Justice. Soon after Lowrie's departure, the University's experiment in legal education faltered. The Civil War was raging, and the city's attention was fixed on making munitions for the Union Army--not on developing attorneys. Attempts to revive the legal studies program in the 1870s came to nothing. It was not until 1895 that a law school was firmly reestablished as an official division of the University, under the leadership of Judge John D. Shafer.

By 1895, Pittsburgh was already heavily industrialized, a steel capital standing at the confluence of the Three Rivers. A lengthy period of economic recession had bottomed out in the hard times of 1893, and the upturn was about to begin. Recovery would lead to prosperity. The climate was favorable for Pittsburgh's industrialists, bankers, and . . . lawyers. Yet there was still no law school in the city, a circumstance that galled a small group of prominent Pittsburghers, among them William J. Holland, the Chancellor of the Western University of Pennsylvania.

In 1894, a curriculum committee had issued a report to the trustees, stating: "Pittsburgh is the only large city in the United States as yet without a law school. It is manifestly the function of a university to provide such a school." Nearly 30 years later, Chancellor Holland recalled his master strategy: "I went to my honored friend, John D. Shafer, unfolded my scheme, put the whole matter in his hands, and told him to go ahead, select his own faculty, and organize the school." With that, John D. Shafer (1848-1926) became the founding genius behind the School of Law.

The men Dean Shafer hired for the law faculty were all active practitioners who would teach part time in the afternoon. This was not only customary but was regarded as wise by those who were used to the old preceptoral system.

In October 1895, 35 students matriculated to the fledgling law school. Admission standards required the candidates to be at least 18 years old. If the applicant had a college degree or was a qualified teacher, admission was without examination. All others were admitted upon showing proficiency in history, mathematics, literature, and items of general knowledge. Tuition was $50 a term, plus a $5 matriculation fee. The students took six courses: real property, contracts and partnership, torts, pleading at common law, law of persons and domestic relations, and criminal law. Classes were held during the afternoon, usually from 1 to 5 p.m.

During John Shafer's 25 years as dean, the School of Law grew in strength and stature. For the first two years of the school's existence (1895-97), classes were conducted in the orphans' court rooms in the old Allegheny County Courthouse. In 1897, the school moved to bigger quarters in the old Pittsburgh Academy Building at the southwest corner of Ross and Diamond Streets. There the school stayed until after the First World War, when it moved to the Chamber of Commerce Building at Seventh Avenue and Smithfield Street.

In 1897, with the move to larger quarters, a moot court program was instituted for second- and third-year students who met once a week for instruction in advocacy. Also quite early on, a fellowship was established to provide carefully selected graduates with an additional year for each to "perform such duties as are assigned to him by the faculty, receiving for his services the sum of $250." In 1900, the School of Law joined with 31 other law schools to found the Association of American Law Schools, of which it remains a charter member. In 1916, Sara M. Soffel became the first female graduate of the School of Law. Soffel would later become the first woman to teach at the school and the first woman judge in Pennsylvania. The school hired Judson A. Crane, its first full-time professor, in 1917.

Dean Shafer, who was also president judge of the Allegheny County Common Pleas Court, stepped down in 1920. The next year, Chancellor Samuel B. McCormick, who had himself just retired, wrote to the director of the Carnegie Foundation in New York: "The School of Law of the University has made very remarkable progress in these last years. We not only have permanent quarters for the school (in the Chamber of Commerce Building!), but we have three full-time men, and have advanced our entrance requirements to four years of college work." And in 1923, his old friend Chancellor Holland, now nearly 80, was to say: "Judge Shafer may well be termed the 'Father of the Law School' in this University."

A. Marshall Thompson followed Judge Shafer as Dean. During his tenure the school moved again. The St. Patrick's Day flood of 1936 left most of downtown Pittsburgh, including the school's quarters in the Chamber of Commerce Building, uninhabitable. That spring the School of Law left downtown for higher ground and became the first school to fully occupy the University's Oakland skyscraper, the Cathedral of Learning. It was located on the 13th, 14th and 15th floors. Dean Thompson, in his remarks on the dedication of the school's new quarters, described the Cathedral of Learning as "one of the most beautiful and unique educational buildings in the world," and declared that the School of Law had at last found a permanent home--something it had sorely lacked the first 40 years of its existence. Indeed, Dean Marshall said those first four decades "resemble, in some respect, the forty-year period of the wandering of the children of Israel in the wilderness."

But as early as 1950, when the student body numbered only 200 students and 10 faculty, then-Dean Charles Bernard Nutting voiced the first complaints that the lack of space in the Cathedral was hampering the program. From that time on, it became increasingly clear that there was no realistic alternative to a new building.

But the School of Law was to remain housed in the Cathedral of Learning for a second 40 years. It may have been the growth of the library which, more than any other factor, rendered the quarters in the Cathedral obsolete. In the earliest years of the school's existence, the students used the library in the courthouse. In 1915, the school began to build its own library with an original collection of 200 law books donated by the faculty. At about the same time, the trustees of the University gave the school a lump sum of $5,000 to buy 5,000 books--an optimistic order even at the deflated prices of the time. In the '20s and '30s, supplemented by donations of private collections, the library continued to grow.

At the time of the move to the Cathedral of Learning, the school boasted a library of 23,000 volumes. The number of books constantly outran the space that could be made available for them. From the 1960s on, sizable numbers of volumes had to be removed from the open stacks and placed in hard-to-reach storage areas. Worse yet, the lack of space meant that needed acquisitions had to be held down.

The size of the student population grew as well. During the deanship of W. Edward Sell, the School of Law went from barely 100 students in 1965 to more than 500 in 1975. There were three main reasons for this growth. The University's state-related status, which it earned in 1967, provided state residents with a tuition subsidy that took the lid off enrollments. The romanticizing of the profession was also a factor: the mystique of the lawyer as activist against corruption and agent for constructive change attracted students who, at other times, would have been channeled into graduate schools to pursue degrees in political science, economics, sociology, and the like. And the women's rights movement had the general effect of stimulating women to seek entry into formerly male-dominated professions.

Faced with the prospect of ever-increasing enrollment and severe space shortages, Dean Sell, with the aid of some staunch alumni and a sympathetic University administration, lobbied relentlessly for a new building. After a number of false starts, ground for the new structure was broken in November 1972, and three more years were to pass before the building was completed.

Finally, on a cold January morning in 1976, the School of Law began classes in its new building. Gone were the long waits for elevators in the Cathedral, the overcrowded library, the congested hallways, and the practically non-existent study and conference space. In their place is a spacious and fully equipped six-story law center, which could serve as a model of utility and beauty for law schools everywhere.

The Barco Law Library occupies the third, fourth, and fifth floors of the new building, with usable square footage greater than all the space available to the school in the Cathedral of Learning. Its present collection of more than 325,000 volumes and volume equivalents is in open stacks, easily accessible to students, faculty, and the bench and bar. In 1983, the library's capacity was further expanded by the Harold Obernauer Computerized Legal Research Center, which gives students access to the LEXIS and WESTLAW legal research computer services, as well as a microcomputer lab for law students' use.

During these years of physical growth, Dean Sell and his successor, Dean John E. Murray, Jr., worked to strengthen the student body, the faculty, the curriculum, and the method of instruction. Every year, while the number of matriculating students rose, their quality improved as well.

The full-time faculty members and adjunct instructors are prolific legal scholars as well as talented teachers. The School of Law faculty has been ranked among the top 20 or 30 law school faculties contributing to leading law journals and reviews.

Recent years have also seen dramatic growth in the law school curriculum. While continuing to offer the traditional core courses, such as Property, Torts, and Criminal Law, the school has expanded its curriculum to reflect the emergence of new areas of the law, such as intellectual property and administrative law, and the development of subspecialties of core courses, such as Real Estate Transactions, a branch of Property. Current course offerings such as Law and Medicine, Elder Law and Guardianship, and Feminist Legal Theory also take into account the interdisciplinary nature of legal transactions today.

The law school curriculum is designed to teach students to think like lawyers--both through the traditional classroom experience and through wide-ranging opportunities to experience the law in action. Students in the school's legal clinics earn academic credit while working with actual clients on cases in the areas of elder law, child welfare, health law, and criminal appeals. They may also take advantage of the Externship Program, in which students work for federal and state judges, county district attorneys, and public organizations. "Skills" courses in trial tactics, legislative drafting, and client counseling also help prepare Pitt law students for real-world interactions.