BACK PAGES:The prospect of competition from a new university law school in London prompted The Irish Timesto pull few punches in its criticism of the less than impressive state of the law school in Trinity College Dublin some 130 years ago.
There will be established, by and bye, in Lincoln’s Inn, or its neighbourhood, a great and well-endowed Legal University. Its chairs will be occupied, in the beginning, at all events, by men of the calibre of Vernon Harcourt and Sir Roundell Palmer . . . Has the Board of Trinity College, Dublin, taken any steps to face the formidable competition of this new rival to their Law School?
If not, we apprehend that that school will be left with empty benches. The Trinity Law School has been always conducted in rather a perfunctory fashion. It consists of only two professors, who are supposed to equip the student with the knowledge he requires in seven or eight distinct and difficult branches. One of these gentlemen is Prof of Feudal and English Law: the subjects assigned to the other are Civil and Canon Law. What becomes of Commercial, Criminal, Constitutional, International, Maritime, and Matrimonial Law, we can only conjecture.
We are pretty sure that there is and always has been room in the school for another professor or two. There will certainly be a strong corps of lecturers in the Lincoln’s-Inn University. In the Law School of TCD, the professorships are not only too few, but they have not always been efficiently worked.
One of the present professors, Judge Longfield, will always be remembered as an honour to the chair he held; but he has for several years been obliged, through failing health, to discharge his duty by deputy. The salary attached to the chair is £700 a year, a splendid one, considering that the professor is allowed to practise at the Bar. But out of this £700 Dr Longfield’s successive deputies have received only the trivial remuneration of £100 or £150 a year. If this arrangement is fair to the deputy, it is not fair to the student.
The latter is entitled to the best teaching he can get for the money which has been provided for the purpose by the college. Now it will not be contended, we suppose, that in the matter of teaching no more than in any other service or commodity £150 will go as far as £700.
With great respect to Judge Longfield, we must say that it is time that he should vacate the chair. When he accepted it, he did so on the condition that his tenure of it would cease and determine in case he should be raised to the Judicial Bench. In course of time he was raised to the bench of the Incumbered, afterwards the Landed Estates Court. The salary of this judicial office was £3,000 a year.
This sum is inferior to the salaries of the judges of the principal courts in existence at the time the stipulation was made and on this plea the board permitted Judge Longfield to retain his chair along with his judicial office . . .
Nobody would stickle for technical rights in the case of so able and conscientious an officer if his circumstances were such as to require an exercise of liberality at the expense of strict justice. But Judge Longfield’s circumstances are very much the opposite of this; and in the interests of the law students of this country, and in the face of the approaching competition of the Lincoln’s Inn University, we protest against a continuance of this waste of educational endowments. There is a time for liberality, and there are times when liberality becomes mere feebleness and a dereliction of public duty.
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