ABOVE the entrance to the Sterling Law Buildings at Yale, there are two panels of bas relief. One shows a medieval classroom with the professor asleep; the other pictures an ancient courtroom with the judge asleep.

Outside the Graduate Center at Harvard Law School stands the modern, metallic "World Tree."

Some would claim that Yale's figures show a sense of humor and a relaxed approach to the law, while Harvard's "Tree" is cold and forbidding. Others might say that the medieval scenes at Yale indicate Yale is living in the past, and that Harvard is the school not only of the present, but of the future.

The case of Harvard v. Yale is not that simple. For both schools have had great pasts, and most agree that they will have great futures. Prominent Yale Law graduates include Herbert Brownell, and Estes Kefauver.

Harvard has also contributed men to present-day public-life--men like David Lilienthal, Dean Acheson, and the late Robert T. Taft.

Academic revolution

Academically, times have changed at the two schools. Several years ago, it may have been appropriate to say that. "Harvard teaches what the law is. and Yale teaches what the law should be." Today that would be as outdated as to shout "Keep Cool with Coolidge" in an election campaign. The schools necessarily teach basic legal traditions, and both also teach that law is a living and developing institution. Harvard, by introducing the case study method, and Yale, by beginning the so-called "policy approach to the law," achieved revolutions in legal education.

Both have, in a sense, begun to study each other's case books. For the legal contents at Harvard once was bare of anything that might set law in its economic and social contexts. Law was viewed as something static--the lawyer was a mere technician who had to discover a prescribed set of rules known as the law. The case study method, developed by Dean Langdell in 1870, was central to Harvard's study of law, and most law schools throughout the country have since adopted it. Studying decisions of the past helped the lawyer or judge to find the correct decision in the present.

Or that is what the legal world thought until Yale undertook the second revolution in the teaching of law. Under former Dean Hutchins and Professors Thurman Arnold and William O. Douglas, the "policy approach" was introduced in the 1920's and 1930's. Law became an instrument which the judge could adapt to certain philosophical or social ends. These men felt that it was insufficient to study cases only, without knowing the judge's own philosophical values. Thus Yale law students studied past legal decisions, but they also consciously strove to develop their own set of values, which were as important as legal precedents. "What should the judge have done?" was the constant question around Yale halls.

Social orientation

Yale still offers courses oriented to the "policy approach." Professor Harold Lasswell, for instance, a social scientist on the Law faculty, with Professor Myers McDougal, gives a course in "World Community and Law," which presents international law "in the perspective of the world-power process." Philosopher-lawyer Filmer Northrop teaches "Philosophy of Natural Science and Natural Law." Professor Fowler Harper, too, in his course on "Family Law," considers not only such things as divorce law, but also the psychological and personality conflicts that lead to divorce. As he says, "We want to go behind the law to find what makes people commit adultery."

Certain professors at Yale disapprove of such a sociological view of law, however. As Professor James Moore says about the policy approach, "I think the damn thing's a myth. I don't want to be fussing around with sociology and psychiatry when I'm talking about federal jurisdiction." Of course, he recognizes that certain fields of law, such as anti-trust, probably demand a more functional approach, because there are "lots of questions that have never been settled."

The new dean of Yale Law School, Harry Shulman, Harvard Law LL.B. '26 and S.J.D. '27, probably comes nearest to the truth about the differences between Harvard and Yale approaches to law when he says, "There is as much difference within each faculty as there is between the two. Not all of our professors teach by any one method." He emphasizes the value of studying law in its context in life, for law "is not an autonomous body of doctrines and principles." And yet, he says, this policy approach, if mishandled, "becomes superficial. A professor can pass off for knowledge what is really ignorance in another field. It can become sloppy."

Dean Shulman, as a piece of stolen goods from Harvard, will probably restore to Yale a sense of balance, for he is well known as a labor arbitrator for such companies as Ford. He also teaches his own course in Labor Law. The 51-year-old dean was born in Russia, was brought to the United States in 1912, and became a U.S. citizen in 1921.

Yale students, of course, have realized the limits to the policy approach before the advent of the new dean. Despite the elective system, in which all courses are elective after the first year, only a handful of students take many of the more radical policy courses. In preparation for bar examinations and for future practice of the law, most see that the standard courses in Torts, Contracts, and so forth, are safer and perhaps more valuable.