‘Law schools,’ wrote Maitland, ‘make tough law.’ He was referring immediately to the durability of the Lombardic law of Pavia, but only by way of introduction to his thesis that the inns of court had saved English law in the age of the Renaissance. Of our inns of court he went on to say that it would be ‘difficult to conceive any scheme better suited to harden and toughen a traditional body of law than one which, while books were still uncommon, compelled every lawyer to take part in legal education and every distinguished lawyer to read public lectures’. The exact import of Maitland's Rede Lecture has been itself the subject of academic disputations, but the present essay is not concerned with that problem so much as the seemingly incidental proposition or assumption that law schools have something to do with making law – tough or otherwise. Of the many themes floated in the Cambridge Senate House on 5 June 1901, this one has been undeservedly neglected by almost all commentators except Professor Jenkins. Yet it may well turn out to have been the most important theme of all. Historians of the common law have naturally tended to seek the threads of legal development in the jurisprudence of the year books and plea rolls. Dare we consider the possibility that the doctrine or learning of the law schools contributed at least as much to the development of the common law?