Even before the legal integration of the Parisian faculties into the single entity of the "Universite de Paris" in 1896, the law faculty stood out as the most recalcitrant and resistant to the spirit of reform. In the years that followed, far from embodying republican ideals, it became known as a site of anti-republican ideological fervor. Even as the training of administrative and political elites was transformed and the demands of science became a primary source of symbolic capital for the republican regime, the law faculty remained largely attached to traditional models of pedagogy and scholarship. As a result, it faced a crisis over what one commentator called its "social function" in the Republic, a crisis that was not resolved until the middle of the twentieth century. In this article, the author considers the minutes of the Paris law faculty council along with published sources to examine why it came to present an unusual combination of resistance and accommodation to republican educational policies. As the minutes of the faculty meetings make clear, resistance to change had less to do with either intellectual conservatism, the "backwardness" of legal scholarship, or political conservatism, a visceral anti-republican agenda, than it did with a complex dynamic between professional, institutional, and disciplinary concerns that stemmed from the democratization of higher education. (Contains 1 table and 80 footnotes.)