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Julian P. Alexander
Assistant United States Attorney
Mississippi 1917
. . . But so much for the history of the evolution of the Latin language as the monument on which our legal maxims and axioms, as well as much of our legal history, are engraved. We might have gone so far as to have disregarded the explanation of the existence of Latin in our legal texts and accept the plain fact that it is there. But its presence is the result of the same considerations and necessities that have preserved it through so many adversities down to the present time.
So then, the advantages of a training in Latin might be said to be those that attend the study of history, as well as of etymology, and so the student of law encounters on every hand phrases and principles carved in Latin and transmitted to him and his age in their original vigor and shades of meaning. Many, he finds, have become so familiar that he adopts them as "naturalized." Actions of assumpsit, quo warranto, and upon a quantum meruit or quantum valebat, writs of capias and subpoena, pleadings of nol. pros, and pro confesso, are so familiar that he often loses sight of their original significance. Yet the student must draw upon his knowledge of the Latin to assure himself that he knows the distinction between a summons and a subpoena, a capias, a warrant and a mittimus, between a habeas corpus ad testificandum and a habeas corpus ad satisfaciendum, between scire facias, venire facias and fieri facias, and administrators de bonis non, cum testamento annexo, and de son tort. Is the layman correct when he speaks of "subordination" of perjury? To the Latin students the value and importance of obiter dicta in applying the doctrine of stare decisis are amply explained within the phrases themselves.
It may be that the student learns his Latin in the study of law. If this fact does not demand that he come thus already prepared to the study of law, it at least suggests the advantage of doing so. As suggested, if the student is not prepared in Latin he must to some extent become acquainted with its expressions, regardless of his views as to its necessity. If the use of Latin terminology, for example, is cumbersome for the botanist or the pharmacist, the best answer is that its presence in those sciences is undeniable.
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A moderate classical education is essential to a proper understanding of the sciences, and is necessary for clear, accurate and incisive recording and transmission of scientific thought.
W. J. Mayo
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William Campbell Posey:
Latin is a sine qua non to the physician. The formulas of his prescriptions are embodied in that language and most early medical writings found expression in it.
Both Greek and Latin give to the physician a culture impossible of acquirement by other means, and the higher a man's culture, the better he is prepared to minister to the needs of his ailing fellows.
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