The University of Louisville 97 l
Furthermore, state universities and other tax-supported in- *
stitutions of learning had no money to use for law schools.
Legislatures were not inclined to appropriate the people’s y
money for legal education. Lawyers, as a professional class,
were generally satisfied with office education. It was in this
way that they had become lawyers, and what was good enough
for them was good enough for the next generation. Then,
- too, since most of the legislators were lawyers, they were not_ '·
disposed to help set up law schools that would deny them the
services of apprentices who wanted to read law and who .
performed much of the drudgery about the office. A
The founders of the early law schools were mainly men
of foresight and vision, even though they may have con- T
ducted only proprietary classes. They performed a valuable
service in laying the foundation upon which the law school l
of the modern university has been built. As A. Z. Reed  
said in his Truiiriug for the Public Profession of Luzv:  
4
Subsequent generations have put this inheritance to better use,
sometimes a little too much in a spirit of contempt for their predeces-
sors. Due credit has not always been given to the courage and self-
sacrihce displayed by educational promoters, and by proprietary law
school teachers in their efforts to bring primitive institutions into ex-
istence and to keep them alive—to establish, in short, against the
hostility of the profession itself, the claim of the American college
to participate even in a nominal way in the professional training of
American lawyers.3 ,
The Law Department of the University of Louisville did
not originate as a proprietary school. Two of its first three A
professors had been members of the board of trustees of the
university and had resigned their trusteeships in order to
ri