ABSTRACT
Three of the four judges who presided at Preston’s and the soldiers’ trials attended Harvard College; none of the four attended law school. Indeed, there was no law school for them to attend. Colonial American lawyers learned the law under an apprenticeship system that is now little understood and too easily dismissed as inferior to the formal schooling now required before an aspiring attorney can become a member of the Bar in most states. Apprenticeships could be as inexact as they were informal, lacking method or substance. But as Professor Dan Coquillette has argued, for a privileged few the apprenticeship approach had much to recommend it and it was not inherently inferior because young lawyers learned their trade in an office rather than a classroom. It is clear that at least in some instances they did not simply perform mundane tasks as clerks for the lawyers who took them on; they read in legal philosophy as well as court procedure and learned as much about the principles of justice that undergird the rule of law as students learn now through the case study approach. 99
