51

E.—7a,

" (b.) Raising the standard of the Solicitors' General Knowledge Examination. " (e.) Ensuring that such questions are set in the Law Professional Examinations as test the candidate's grasp of principles and capacity to apply them as distinguished from merely memorized knowledge of the sentences in which principles are expressed. " (d.) The use of statutes and/or text-books in some of the examinations —for example, the use of Stout and Sim's Practice and Cruickshank's Magistrate's Court Act —by candidates in practice and procedure." It is, we think, practically certain that if a Council of Legal Education is formed to supervise the education and training of lawyers the Council will see the necessity of establishing a fully equipped and staffed Law School in the most suitable centre. Such a school, in addition to a strong staff of specialist teachers, would have a complete law library. On the question of a special Law School, Professor J. Adamson, Victoria. College, spoke very definitely : — " There is at present no Law School in New Zealand. Seventeen years ago I was appointed to Victoria College, one of my duties being to organize a Law School. When I arrived I found the Law School was a myth, and it has remained so ever since. It is probably now too late to determine whether or not provision for teaching for the law degree should be made in all four centres, but I am convinced that there ought to be only one Law School in New Zealand —i.e., a proper Law School in which every department is under the charge of an expert in his special branch of the subject." In regard to law libraries, the conditions under which law students and teachers work at present are very unsatisfactory. A Law School without a good library is as hard to conceive as a Chemistry School without a good laboratory. There could probably be no stronger condemnation of legal education in New Zealand than the striking omission of all guarantee of efficient practical training in legal methods, and the absence of library facilities, with its consequent lack of training in the use of books of reference. The Dean of the Faculty of Law, Otago, in reply to our request for information as to library facilities, wrote : — " The Otago University College library makes no provision for law students. No books such as are of use to the law students in their own studies have ever been specially provided. The library of the Otago District Law Society is, however, open during the daytime to all properly accredited students. Books of use to students are also placed in the lecture-rooms. But the point I make is the point I made when I appeared before the Commission —namely, that the course as at present contrived leaves the student no time, and encourages no inclination on his part to go into the law library. He takes his text-books. He knows that every generation of students before him for many years has passed the examinations on the study of these text-books and nothing else. As the course encourages undue hurry on the part of the student, he is not prepared to waste his time, as he looks at it, in cultivating an acquaintance with the contents of a law library." If this be the considered opinion of a responsible teacher, the urgency of reform in legal education needs little further argument. UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN ENGINEERING. The present provision of university teaching in engineering presents one of the most thorny problems with which we have had to deal. Professedly, the teaching of only one Engineering School, i.e., Canterbury, is recognized by the Senate as qualifying candidates to sit for the degree of Civil, Mechanical, or Electrical Engineering. Three of the four university colleges do, as a matter of fact, provide courses leading to engineering degrees or diplomas, while in the fourth college there are students who have vocational ambitions for engineering and who are studying for the B.Sc. degree, including the course in physical technology, as

A special School of Law desirable.

Law libraries.

All University colleges provide some instruction in engineering.