Word: legalism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Less ambitiously contrived than such past celluloid legal biographies as The Mouthpiece (Warners) and For The Defense (Paramount), Man of the People is rather a character sketch than a story. In spite of its quiet manner and narrative form, it carries the conviction that always clings to an interesting subject handled with a minimum of frills. This conviction depends on accumulated detail and testifies to Screen Playwright Frank Dolan's diligent observation in the days when he was covering trials for Manhattan newspapers...
...girl he does not love and working for a notable criminal, shyster Lawyer Brandon (Lee Tracy) ditches both when he encounters a pretty streetwalker (Margot Grahame) in night court and when he is offered the district attorney's job. This lands him in both marital and legal hot water which reaches the boiling point in the inevitable courtroom finale. Portraying four other court battles as well, Criminal Lawyer obtains its only tinge of interest from the clever cross-questioning tactics of Lawyer Brandon...
...return to reason. To him the university is the place of all places to grapple with those fundamental principles which rational thought seeks to establish. Too much of education, he says, is based on the false notion that education is a substitute, instead of a preparation, for experience. Of legal education he says: "To tell a law student that the law is what the courts will do and have him reach his conclusions on this point by counting up what they have done is to forego rational analysis, to deny the necessity of principles, and to prevent the exercise...
...brilliance, Chicago's Hutchins shredded the complacency of nearly 1,000 members of the New York State Bar Association with an indictment of the limited notion lawyers have of their profession. Then, with equal candor, he propounded his philosophy of law on which he built a program for legal education. Then he dared the Bar really to reform legal education. His dramatic appeal did not come kindly to all the listening legalists in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom, but they voted him an honorary member of their Bar in admiration of his eloquence...
President Hutchins is a lawyer by training. He believes that lawyers and educators interested in training lawyers must reconstruct legal education so as to achieve a learned profession and the common good. He would train lawyers to practice for the welfare of the community and not as a means of making money. Legal education as he would provide it would train student lawyers thus: ¶To search for and order knowledge relevant to legal problems. C. To know the methods of legal analysis...