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be admitted on further examination to practice also in the highest courts of the State.
This distinction reaches back, in New Jersey, to the colonial era. Attorneys were there a different class from "counsellors," and, following the English practice, the style of "sergeant" was also formerly bestowed on leaders at the bar. The last lawyer bearing the title survived until nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. In this State the Governor has always issued the licenses or commissions to attorneys and solicitors in chancery, but for more than a hundred and fifty years only on the recommendation of the Supreme Court.[Footnote: In re Branch, 70 N. J. Law Reports; 57 Atlantic Reporter, 431.]
The admission of attorneys in the several courts of the United States is determined by rules which they respectively establish from time to time. These rules make the only qualification membership in regular standing for a certain period of time in the bar of a State and good moral character.
There is no doubt that the United States have been in advance of England both in providing means of legal education and in requiring their use. The length of the course of study now established at our older Law Schools--three years--seems all that can reasonably be exacted, if a proper foundation of general discipline and knowledge has been previously laid. The first provision for one or more years of graduate study for those who may desire it was made at Yale University in 1876, and a similar opportunity has since been offered at several others; but it has been availed of by few, and of these a considerable part had in view the teaching of law as their ultimate vocation rather than its practice.
Unquestionably the American bar is now, as a whole, a far better trained class of men than it was twenty or thirty years ago, and the efficiency of the courts has been correspondingly increased.
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Members of the bar are always subject to punishment by the court for official misconduct. Th