In the 1850s, few lawyers were trained at university in the common-law world. But new law courses were being established, particularly in the United States, to meet a slowly growing demand for better training.
The University of Melbourne joined this trend in 1857. To boost its flagging enrolments, it created a law course, taught by its first reader in law, Richard Clarke Sewell.
Thirty-nine students enrolled and attended the inaugural lecture on 11 March 1857. Sewell told his students that lawyers had a bad reputation, but hoped that the new course would help to improve it:
it was to rescue the profession from obloquy such as this, to save it from bitter contumely and scorn … that those, whose anxious care has been devoted to the moral and intellectual training of our youth, have proposed to establish that, which, if it be successfully carried out, will, I trust, be, in its highest sense, a School of Law.
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