When the Yale Law School faculty voted to change its grading system last year no one batted an eye in either New Haven or Cambridge. The new system, reducing all grades to four--excellent, satisfactory, pass, and flunk--was designed to reduce the emphasis on percentage points, an emphasis which exists strongly at Harvard.

This change served to point up a well-known fact: while among national law schools, Harvard and Yale are at the top, while they both accept only the highest calibre men and put them through intensive training, while they both turn out some of the nation's top lawyers and public administrators, in many significant ways the two schools are quite different.

Harvard Law School, alma mater of such a variety of men as Holmes, Brandeis. Lillenthal and Senator Taft, has the biggest name in the business. Famed for the development of the case method under Langdell, the first dean, and once Infamous for its now abandoned policy of flunking one-third of each first-year class, the school has stuck to its principles of rigor and tough mental discipline in the study of law.

The Yale Law School, smaller, friendlier, and less-well-known, has been a place of ferment and experimentation in legal theory and teaching since Robert Hutching was dean in the late twenties. Thurman Arnold and William O. Douglas sparked the faculty in the late thirties.

When Harvard finally made its tradition-smashing decision two years ago to admit women, Yale met the news with the amusement of an experienced man of the world. The Elis have admitted women for many years; at the moment there are over thirty, many of them high-ranking scholars.

Size Causes Differences

Many of the differences between the Harvard and Yale Law Schools stem from the fact that one is big and the other small. Harvard, with an entering class (550 in '49-'50, for example) larger than all three classes at Yale, is a big professional school. At Yale, where the first-year class totaled 148 for the same year, now students soon get to know everyone in their class, and eventually the whole school. This intimacy promotes a friendlier atmosphere which Yale students praise as "fine group spirit" and which Harvard men are likely to sniff at as collegiate.

The physical layout of the Yale school seems to contribute to this spirit. The Sterling, Law Buildings, which occupy a block next to the Yale library, form a quadrangle of campus gothic surrounding a picturesque court. All the class-rooms, offices, the dining hall, the library, and the men's dormitories are in these buildings. Usually, most of the first-year men live in the quadrangle along with upperclassmen. The easy intermingling helps newcomers learn the ropes quickly and naturally.

The Student Association, a very active student council, runs some five dances a term which are heavily attended by both students and faculty. There are frequent cocktail parties. Weekends, particularly during the football season, are uproarious, and when New Haven palls, students find New York and Poughkeepsie close enough for convenient commuting.

Harvard Not Inhuman

The very size of the Harvard Law School precludes the sort of friendly community spirit evident at Yale, although Harvard is not the inhuman LL.B. factory that critics make it out to be. The students have plenty of social life and take a number of weekends off. The teaching fellow program and the opening of the new Graduate center has helped remove some of the admitted impersonality from student life. But there is no doubt that the grind here is more demanding, and that the atmosphere of the place is less leisurely. Harvard men are notorious for the time they spend "talking law."

Partly because of its size and because of its traditional reputation, the school draws its student body from a wider geographical and economic range than Yale. In 1949, Harvard Law students represented 255 different colleges, as against Yale's 146, for example. Of course, getting to know a variety of people in a group of 1500 demands initiative which is unnecessary in the smaller school.

Yale feels that one of the chief advantages of its size is the amount of contact between students and faculty, both in and out of class. Men get to know their teachers well in the small classes and seminars; and they meet them socially at student parties and dances. It is not uncommon for a Yale upperclassman to call his instructor by his first name.

In Harvard's more formal atmosphere, student-faculty contact is generally limited to the classroom and to office-hours. There are exceptions, of course: men in the more important organizations--particularly the Law Review Staff--see a great deal of the faculty.

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