Star Athletica, LLC v. Varsity Brands, Inc.
Star Athletica, LLC v. Varsity Brands, Inc. 580 U. S. ___, was a Supreme Court of the United States case in which the Court decided under what circumstances aesthetic elements of "useful articles" can be restricted by copyright law. The Court created a two-prong "separability" test, granting copyrightability on conditions of separate identification and independent existence. In other words, the aesthetic elements must be identifiable as art if mentally separated from the article's practical use and must qualify as copyrightable pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works if expressed in any medium; the case concerned a dispute between Star Athletica and Varsity Brands. Star Athletica began creating cheerleading uniforms with stripes and chevron insignia similar to some made by Varsity, produced at a far lower price point. Varsity sued Star Athletica for copyright infringement and Star Athletica claimed the clothing designs were uncopyrightable because their aesthetic designs were tied so to and guided by their utilitarian purposes as uniforms.
The Court rejected this argument with a close reading of the statute and established that the clothing designs, as aesthetic elements of the useful article of clothing, could be copyrightable. The Court had declined to hear Star Athletica's follow-up question concerning whether Varsity's specific designs were original enough to be copyrightable, so that part of the case remained unaddressed and Varsity's copyright registrations stood; the Court's conclusion that aesthetic elements of useful articles, thereby clothing design elements, could be copyrighted excited fashion designers and intellectual property scholars. Some loved the decision because they saw extending copyright to clothes as parity with other creative industries that had enjoyed copyrights for much longer. Others denounced the Court's opinion over ambiguities in how to enforce the new rules and because of its potential to end fashion trends in generic clothing. At one time, clothing designs were not subject to copyright law, or "uncopyrightable," in the United States.
In 1941, the Court heard Fashion Originators' Guild of America v. FTC, which considered the fashion industry's practice of boycotting sale of their "high fashion" works at places that would sell knock-offs made by other companies for lower prices, so-called "style piracy"; the court ruled against the Guild, saying that this practice of attempting to create a monopoly outside of the copyright system suppressed free competition and violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. However, outside fashion, Mazer v. Stein established in 1954 that an artistic statue created to adorn a lamp base could be copyrightable separately from the utilitarian lamp under expansions from the Copyright Act of 1909; the statue's mass-production alongside the lamp did not invalidate that. Another barrier to copyrightability in the United States is a certain vague threshold of originality that must be met to be eligible for an intellectual property monopoly like a copyright or patent. In 1964's Sears, Roebuck & Co. v. Stiffel Co. the Court agreed with a lower court's ruling that Stiffel's popular lamp design was not original enough to warrant a patent preventing the lamp's sale by Sears, rescinding that restriction and passing the design to the public domain.
The Court's opinion indicated. In the Copyright Act of 1976, Congress changed the copyright law to allow copyrighting aesthetic features of "useful articles," or "an article having an intrinsic utilitarian function, not to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information." This move was intended to better incorporate the Mazer v. Stein ruling while clarifying the difference between the copyrightability of "applied art" and the more traditional, lesser restriction of "industrial design," the overall combination of features, provided by design patents or trade dress; the Act said "pictorial, graphic, or sculptural features" of useful articles were copyrightable only if "separable" from the utilitarian aspects of the design and capable of existing independently of the article. This broad definitional language lead to a proliferation of about ten competing, inconsistent legal tests for that separability, a state of affairs criticized for appearing to have judges serve as art critics.
Because clothes have both aesthetic and utilitarian features in their designs, they fall under this useful article category. Designs placed on clothing were opened up to the possibility of copyrightability, subject to those tests; the law was construed to mean that copyrighted two-dimensional designs could be placed on clothing, fabric pattern sheets could be copyrighted before being cut to make clothing, but an article of clothing's overall color scheme and design could not be copyrighted because it was not capable of existing independently of the final useful article. Some fashion designers bristled under these rules, wondering why other creative industries like films or music were allowed to restrict access to their products with copyright and they were not. Others interpreted fashion's successes as an industry thriving in the absence of copyright in part because of that. Congresspeople introduced several bills over the years to outright remove the separability requirement from the law, but none of these were signed into law.
Nonetheless, Varsity Brands, the largest cheerleading and sports uniform manufacturer in the world, could not register copyrights for the designs of their cheerleading uniforms as clothing. Instead, Varsity applied for copyrights on drawings and photographs of those designs as "two-dimensional artwork" or "fabric design." That design represented in t
Royal Library of the Netherlands
The Royal Library of the Netherlands is based in The Hague and was founded in 1798. The mission of the Royal Library of the Netherlands, as presented on the library's web site, is to provide "access to the knowledge and culture of the past and the present by providing high-quality services for research and cultural experience"; the initiative to found a national library was proposed by representative Albert Jan Verbeek on August 17 1798. The collection would be based on the confiscated book collection of William V; the library was founded as the Nationale Bibliotheek on November 8 of the same year, after a committee of representatives had advised the creation of a national library on the same day. The National Library was only open to members of the Representative Body. King Louis Bonaparte gave the national library its name of the Royal Library in 1806. Napoleon Bonaparte transferred the Royal Library to The Hague as property, while allowing the Imperial Library in Paris to expropriate publications from the Royal Library.
In 1815 King William I of the Netherlands confirmed the name of'Royal Library' by royal resolution. It has been known as the National Library of the Netherlands since 1982, when it opened new quarters; the institution became independent of the state in 1996, although it is financed by the Department of Education and Science. In 2004, the National Library of the Netherlands contained 3,300,000 items, equivalent to 67 kilometers of bookshelves. Most items in the collection are books. There are pieces of "grey literature", where the author, publisher, or date may not be apparent but the document has cultural or intellectual significance; the collection contains the entire literature of the Netherlands, from medieval manuscripts to modern scientific publications. For a publication to be accepted, it must be from a registered Dutch publisher; the collection is accessible for members. Any person aged 16 years or older can become a member. One day passes are available. Requests for material take 30 minutes.
The KB hosts several open access websites, including the "Memory of the Netherlands". List of libraries in the Netherlands European Library Nederlandse Centrale Catalogus Books in the Netherlands Media related to Koninklijke Bibliotheek at Wikimedia Commons Official website
UC Berkeley School of Law
The University of California, School of Law is one of 14 schools and colleges at the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley Law is ranked as one of the top public law schools in the United States and one of the top law schools in the world; the law school has produced leaders in law and society, including Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, United States Secretary of State Dean Rusk, United States Attorney General Edwin Meese, United States Secretary of the Treasury and Chairman of the Federal Reserve G. William Miller, Solicitor General of the United States Theodore Olson, lead litigator of the Korematsu v. United States civil rights case, Dale Minami; the Department of Jurisprudence was founded at Berkeley in 1894. In 1912, the department was renamed the School of Jurisprudence, it was again renamed as the School of Law in 1950; the School was located in the center of the main UC Berkeley campus in Boalt Memorial Hall of Law, built in 1911 with funds from Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt donated in memory of her late husband, John Henry Boalt, an attorney who had resided in Oakland, California until his death in 1901.
In 1951, the School moved to its current location in the new law building, the instructional portion of, named Boalt Hall, at the southeast corner of the campus, the old Boalt Hall was renamed Durant Hall. In April 2008, the law school rebranded itself through a change of name from "Boalt Hall" to "Berkeley Law" to tie the law school's name more with the campus upon which it resides; the administration hoped that this would improve the law school's national and international name recognition since people know of UC Berkeley and that it has a law school but are confused by the use of'Boalt Hall'. Berkeley Law has 850 J. D. students, 200 students in the LL. M. and J. S. D. Programs, 45 students in the Ph. D. program in Social Policy. The School features specialized curricular programs in Business and Economics, Comparative Legal Studies, Environmental Law, International Legal Studies and Technology, Social Justice; the J. D. program's admissions process is selective. Berkeley Law is known to value high undergraduate GPAs.
Berkeley has the 9th highest 75th percentile GPA. According to U. S. News and World Report, Berkeley has the 12th lowest acceptance rate among U. S. law schools, with about 25% of applicants admitted. For the class entering in the fall of 2017, 1,266 out of 5,466 applicants were offered admission, with 303 matriculating; the 25th and 75th Law School Admission Test percentiles for the 2017 entering class were 164 and 168 with a median of 166. The 25th and 75th undergraduate GPA percentiles were 3.66 and 3.88 with a median of 3.79. Berkeley Law's grading system for the J. D. program is similar to the grading system used at Yale Law School. Students are graded on a High Honors and Pass scale. 60% of the students in each class receive a grade of Pass, 30% receive a grade of Honors, the highest 10% receive a grade of High Honors. The top student in each class or section receives the Jurisprudence Award, while the second-place student receives the Prosser Prize. For a typical class in the J. D. program, the average age of admitted students is 24 years old, over a range of ages from 20 to 48 years old.
Berkeley Law's tuition has increased in recent years. Tuition and fees are $49,364 per year and $53,315 per year. Most out-of-state students may claim in-state status in their second year of study; the faculty of Berkeley Law provide academic direction and the bulk of the instruction for the undergraduate program in Legal Studies, organized as a major in Letters and Science. The Legal Studies program is not intended as a pre-law program, but rather as a liberal arts program "that can encourage sustained reflection on fundamental values."Berkeley Law has a chapter of the Order of the Coif, a national law school honorary society founded for the purposes of encouraging legal scholarship and advancing the ethical standards of the legal profession. It is an American Bar Association approved law school since 1923, it joined the Association of American Law Schools in 1912. Berkeley Law offers combined degree programs with other schools at the University of California, as well as MA degrees from Tufts University and Harvard University.
In 2018, QS World Rankings ranked Berkeley Law as the 7th best law school in the world. Law.com ranked Berkeley as one of the top 10 go-to law schools.. In 2018, U. S. News & World Report ranked Berkeley Law as the 9th best law school in the United States, tied with Virginia. US News & World Report ranked Berkeley Law as the best law school in the U. S. for intellectual property, the 3rd best for environmental law, the 10th best for international law. Moreover, US News & World Report ranked Berkeley Law's clinical training program as 10th best in the U. S. Berkeley Law's flagship law review, the California Law Review, is ranked 7th in the U. S. According to Brian Leiter's 2012 scholarly impact study, Berkeley Law ranks 7th in terms of scholarly impact as measured by the percentage of tenured faculty represented in specific specialty areas. In 2010, Law and Politics "Super Lawyers" magazine ranked Berkeley as 9th in the country, just above Yale Law based on the number of Super Lawyers it produces.
890 alumni are in their list of the top 5% of peer rated attorneys for 2009. In July 2017
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley is a public research university in Berkeley, California. It was founded in 1868 and serves as the flagship institution of the ten research universities affiliated with the University of California system. Berkeley has since grown to instruct over 40,000 students in 350 undergraduate and graduate degree programs covering numerous disciplines. Berkeley is one of the 14 founding members of the Association of American Universities, with $789 million in R&D expenditures in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2015. Today, Berkeley maintains close relationships with three United States Department of Energy National Laboratories—Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory—and is home to many institutes, including the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Space Sciences Laboratory. Through its partner institution University of California, San Francisco, Berkeley offers a joint medical program at the UCSF Medical Center.
As of October 2018, Berkeley alumni, faculty members and researchers include 107 Nobel laureates, 25 Turing Award winners, 14 Fields Medalists. They have won 9 Wolf Prizes, 45 MacArthur Fellowships, 20 Academy Awards, 14 Pulitzer Prizes and 207 Olympic medals. In 1930, Ernest Lawrence invented the cyclotron at Berkeley, based on which UC Berkeley researchers along with Berkeley Lab have discovered or co-discovered 16 chemical elements of the periodic table – more than any other university in the world. During the 1940s, Berkeley physicist J. R. Oppenheimer, the "Father of the Atomic Bomb," led the Manhattan project to create the first atomic bomb. In the 1960s, Berkeley was noted for the Free Speech Movement as well as the Anti-Vietnam War Movement led by its students. In the 21st century, Berkeley has become one of the leading universities in producing entrepreneurs and its alumni have founded a large number of companies worldwide. Berkeley is ranked among the top 20 universities in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, the U.
S. News & World Report Global University Rankings, it is considered one of the "Public Ivies", meaning that it is a public university thought to offer a quality of education comparable to that of the Ivy League. In 1866, the private College of California purchased the land comprising the current Berkeley campus in order to re-sell it in subdivided lots to raise funds; the effort failed to raise the necessary funds, so the private college merged with the state-run Agricultural and Mechanical Arts College to form the University of California, the first full-curriculum public university in the state. Upon its founding, The Dwinelle Bill stated that the "University shall have for its design, to provide instruction and thorough and complete education in all departments of science and art, industrial and professional pursuits, general education, special courses of instruction in preparation for the professions". Ten faculty members and 40 students made up the new University of California when it opened in Oakland in 1869.
Frederick H. Billings was a trustee of the College of California and suggested that the new site for the college north of Oakland be named in honor of the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley. In 1870, Henry Durant, the founder of the College of California, became the first president. With the completion of North and South Halls in 1873, the university relocated to its Berkeley location with 167 male and 22 female students where it held its first classes. Beginning in 1891, Phoebe Apperson Hearst made several large gifts to Berkeley, funding a number of programs and new buildings and sponsoring, in 1898, an international competition in Antwerp, where French architect Émile Bénard submitted the winning design for a campus master plan. In 1905, the University Farm was established near Sacramento becoming the University of California, Davis. In 1919, Los Angeles State Normal School became the southern branch of the University, which became University of California, Los Angeles. By 1920s, the number of campus buildings had grown and included twenty structures designed by architect John Galen Howard.
Robert Gordon Sproul served as president from 1930 to 1958. In the 1930s, Ernest Lawrence helped establish the Radiation Laboratory and invented the cyclotron, which won him the Nobel physics prize in 1939. Based on the cyclotron, UC Berkeley scientists and researchers, along with Berkeley Lab, went on to discover 16 chemical elements of the periodic table – more than any other university in the world. In particular, during World War II and following Glenn Seaborg's then-secret discovery of plutonium, Ernest Orlando Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory began to contract with the U. S. Army to develop the atomic bomb. UC Berkeley physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer was named scientific head of the Manhattan Project in 1942. Along with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley was a partner in managing two other labs, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. By 1942, the American Council on Education ranked Berkeley second only to Harvard in the number of distinguished departments.
During the McCarthy era in 1949, the Board of Regents adopted an anti-communist loyalty oath. A number of faculty members led by Edward C. Tolman were dismissed. In 1952, the University of California became; each campus was give
Fordham University School of Law
Fordham University School of Law is a professional graduate school of Fordham University. The school is located in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, is one of eight ABA-approved law schools in that city. In 2013, 91% of the law school's first-time test takers passed the bar exam, placing the law schools' graduates as fifth-best at passing the New York bar exam among New York's 15 law schools. According to Fordham University School of Law's 2014 ABA-required disclosures, 67.8% of the Class of 2014 obtained full-time, long-term, JD-required employment nine months after graduation. The 2018 Academic Ranking of World Universities ranked Fordham Law School as 27th best in the world. According to the information reported to the American Bar Association, 1,151 J. D. students attended Fordham Law in 2015-2016. There are 195 part-time students. Fordham Law offers Master of Laws degrees in the following specializations: Banking, Corporate, & Finance Law. S. Law. LL. M. Students can take a second concentration after finishing the first one by enrolling in a third semester.
Fordham University offers a "3-3 Program" that allows students to earn a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science and a Juris Doctor in six years of study: three at Fordham College and three at Fordham Law. Fordham Law offers three joint degrees in conjunction with Fordham University's other graduate schools: J. D./M. A. in International Political Economy and Development. D./M. B. A.. D./M. S. W.. The School offers a Master of Studies in Law degree with specializations in Corporate Compliance and Fashion Law, as well as a Doctor of Juridical Science degree, full-time, research-based and culminates in a dissertation of at least 50,000 words. Founded in 1905, Fordham Law commemorated its Centennial during the 2005-2006 academic year, capped the year-long celebration with an alumni gala on Ellis Island on September 28, the school's official birthday; the school used the occasion of its Centennial to launch a new fundraising drive in 2005, in just one year had raised more than $10 million thanks in large part to the more than 100 "Centennial Founders" who each contributed $100,000 or more.
The current dean of Fordham Law School is Matthew Diller. In the 2016 edition of U. S. News & World Report's "Best Graduate Schools," Fordham Law was ranked 34th, it has the highest ranked part-time law program in New York state Additionally, five specialty programs were nationally ranked: Dispute Resolution, 13th. According to the American Universities Admission Program's LL. M Rankings, the Fordham Law LL. M program was ranked 6th nationally in 2012. According to The National Law Journal, Fordham Law ranks 20th in percentage of class of 2014 graduates hired by "NLJ 250" firms and 23rd in the number of alumni promoted to partner. In 2015, 85.2% of the law school's first-time test takers passed the bar exam, placing the law school graduates as fourth-most successful New York State bar exam takers among New York's 15 law schools. In a national study of the scholarly impact of law school faculty, Fordham Law’s tenured professors were tied for 35th; the study looks at citations of faculty articles from 2010 through 2014.
In a survey conducted by Vault in 2017, Fordham Law comes 8th in terms of big law placement and 9th when class size was factored in. Located in New York's downtown Financial District, Fordham Law is located on the West Side of Manhattan, as part of Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus; as part of the university's Lincoln Center Master Plan, unveiled in 2005, a new law school building was built. The building took three years to complete, following the groundbreaking on May 2, 2011; the new law school building is part of the university's Phase 1 redevelopment of its Lincoln Center Campus. The 22-story building was designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners to serve a dual-purpose for Fordham University: a nine-story pedestal houses the law school, a 12-story tower serves as an undergraduate residence hall; the law school portion of the building was dedicated on September 18, 2014. Former New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg delivered the keynote address and U. S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor gave a speech before presiding over the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Fordham offers an extensive legal writing program, with many course offerings beyond the first year. All legal writing courses are taught by adjunct professors; the Clinical education program at Fordham Law is ranked 22nd nationally by U. S. News & World Report in its 2016 edition of America's Best Graduate Schools. At Fordham, clinical education is available but not required. Students are selected for clinics via a competitive application process. Fordham students have an opportunity to enroll in clinics following their first year, after taking the Fundamental Lawyering Skills course. 17 clinics are offered: Fordham's clinics represent clients as "Lincoln Square Legal Services," a small law firm housed within the school. The Crowley Program in International Human Rights, named after the late Professor Joseph R. Crowley, was founded in 1997, it is a program of study in international human rights law undertaken in the 2L year, culminating in a two-week overseas fact-finding mission in the summer.
Students in the program are known as Crowley Scholars. The Leitner Center for International Law a
University of California, Berkeley School of Information
The UC Berkeley School of Information or the I School is a graduate school offering four degree programs: a professional master's degree in Information Management and Systems, a professional master's degree in Information and Data Science, a professional master's degree in Information and Cybersecurity, an academic doctoral degree. Created in 1994, the I School is UC Berkeley's newest school, it was known as the School of Information Management and Systems until 2006. Its roots trace back to UC Berkeley's School of Librarianship founded in the 1920s; the program is located in UC Berkeley's South Hall, near Sather Tower in the center of the UC Berkeley campus. The Master of Information Management & Systems program is a 48 unit, two-year program designed to train students for careers as information professionals. Students who complete the program are awarded the Masters of Information Management and Systems degree. During the first year MIMS students take required courses in Information Organization and Retrieval, Distributed Computing Applications and Infrastructure and Organizational Issues of Information, Information Law and Policy.
During the second year students may choose from elective courses both at the I School and in other departments. The final prerequisite for the MIMS degree is the completing of a group or individual thesis project; the Master of Information and Data Science program is an innovative part-time online program that trains data-savvy professionals and managers. Working with data at scale requires distinctive new tools; the MIDS program is distinguished by its disciplinary breadth. The doctoral program is a research-oriented program in which the student chooses specific fields of specialization, prepares sufficiently in the literature and the research of those fields to pass written and oral examinations, completes original research culminating in the written dissertation; the degree of Doctor of Philosophy is conferred in recognition of a candidate's grasp of a broad field of learning and distinguished accomplishment in that field through contribution of an original piece of research revealing high critical ability and powers of imagination and synthesis.
The Master of Information and Cybersecurity degree program addresses multiple aspects of cybersecurity, including cryptography, secure programming, web security, operating system security, network security. The Master's in Cybersecurity is now offered online. Michael Buckland Robert Glushko Marti Hearst Chris Hoofnagle Clifford Lynch Bill Maron Geoffrey Nunberg Xiao Qiang Pamela Samuelson AnnaLee Saxenian Hal Varian Steven Weber Ashkan Soltani danah boyd Heather Ford Holly Liu Reid Hoffman, partner of Greylock Partners and co-founder of LinkedIn and PayPal Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch Genevieve Bell, director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research James Manyika, director at McKinsey & Company Hal Varian, chief economist of Google Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's Online Services Division Ellen Levy, managing director of Silicon Valley Connect & former VP of Strategic Initiatives at LinkedIn Carl Bass, president and CEO of Autodesk, Inc. Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media danah boyd Holly Liu, co-founder of Kabam The School of Information is located in historic South Hall.
Built in 1873, it is the oldest building in the University of California system. South Hall is located near the Doe Library and the Campanile, it is known to have the smallest bear statue on the Berkeley campus. The small bear was added by Michael H. Casey, who did the ornamental castings for the restored facade in 1997. Official website
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States and one of the most prestigious in the world, it is ranked first in the world by the ARWU Shanghai Ranking. Each class in the three-year J. D. program has 560 students, among the largest of the top 150 ranked law schools in the United States. The first-year class is broken into seven sections of 80 students, who take most first-year classes together. Harvard's uniquely large class size and prestige have led the law school to graduate a great many distinguished alumni in the judiciary and the business world. According to Harvard Law's 2015 ABA-required disclosures, 95% of the Class of 2014 passed the Bar exam. Harvard Law School graduates have accounted for 568 judicial clerkships in the past three years, including one-quarter of all Supreme Court clerkships, more than any other law school in the United States.
Harvard Law School's founding is traditionally linked to the funding of Harvard's first professorship in law, paid for from a bequest from the estate of Isaac Royall, Jr. a colonial American landowner and a slaveholder. Today, it is home to the largest academic law library in the world; the current dean of Harvard Law School is John F. Manning, who assumed the role on July 1, 2017; the law school has 328 faculty members. Harvard Law School's founding is traced to the establishment of a "law department" at Harvard in 1817. Dating the founding to the year of the creation of the law department makes Harvard Law the oldest continuously-operating law school in the nation. William & Mary Law School opened first in 1779, but closed due to the American Civil War, reopening in 1920; the University of Maryland School of Law was chartered in 1816, but did not begin classes until 1824, closed during the Civil War. The founding of the law department came two years after the establishment of Harvard's first endowed professorship in law, funded by a bequest from the estate of wealthy slaveowner Isaac Royall, Jr. in 1817.
Royall left 1,000 acres of land in Massachusetts to Harvard when he died in exile in Nova Scotia, where he fled as a British loyalist during the American Revolution, in 1781, "to be appropriated towards the endowing a Professor of Laws... or a Professor of Physick and Anatomy, whichever the said overseers and Corporation shall judge to be best." The value of the land, when liquidated in 1809, was $2,938. The Royalls were so involved in the slave trade, that "the labor of slaves underwrote the teaching of law in Cambridge." The dean of the law school traditionally held the Royall chair, deans Elena Kagan and Martha Minow declined the Royall chair due to its origins in the proceeds of slavery. Royall’s legacy at Harvard is lasting, Harvard Law School adopted the Royall family crest as apart of its school crest; that crest features with three bushels of wheat. Until the connection of the seal to the slave owning Royalls was unknown to many. According to The Harvard Crimson "Most Law School alumni and faculty were unaware of the story behind the seal."
In response to its ties to slavery, Harvard Law School decided to stop using the Royalls seal. It has yet to design a replacement seal. Royall's Medford estate, the Isaac Royall House, is now a museum which features the only remaining slave quarters in the northeast United States; the Royall family coat-of-arms, which shows three stacked wheat sheaves, was adopted as the school crest in 1936, topped with the university motto. In March 2016, following requests by students, the school decided to remove the emblem because of its association with slavery. By 1827, the school, with one faculty member, was struggling. Nathan Dane, a prominent alumnus of the college endowed the Dane Professorship of Law, insisting that it be given to Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. For a while, the school was called "Dane Law School." In 1829, John H. Ashmun, son of Eli Porter Ashmun and brother of George Ashmun, accepted a professorship and closed his Northampton Law School, with many of his students following him to Harvard.
Story's belief in the need for an elite law school based on merit and dedicated to public service helped build the school's reputation at the time, although the contours of these beliefs have not been consistent throughout its history. Enrollment remained low through the 19th century as university legal education was considered to be of little added benefit to apprenticeships in legal practice. After first trying lowered admissions standards, in 1848 HLS eliminated admissions requirements entirely. In 1869, HLS eliminated examination requirements. In the 1870s, under Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell, HLS introduced what has become the standard first-year curriculum for American law schools – including classes in contracts, torts, criminal law, civil procedure. At Harvard, Langdell developed the case method of teaching law, now the dominant pedagogical model at U. S. law schools. Langdell's notion that law could be studied as a "science" gave university legal education a reason for being distinct from vocational preparation.
Critics at first defended the old lecture method because it was faster and cheaper and made fewer demands on faculty and students. Advocates said the case method had a sounder theoretical basis in scientific research and the inductive method. Langdell's graduates became leading professors at other law schools where they introduced the case method; the metho
