History of the American legal profession

The History of the American legal profession covers the work and training and professional activities of lawyers from the colonial era to the present. lawyers grew increasingly powerful in the colonial era, as experts in the English common law which was adopted and all of the colonies. By the 21st century over 1 million practitioners in the United States held law degrees, and many others serve the professional profession as paralegals, marshalls and other aides.

Colonial America

Lawyers and politics

The British governors officials were upper class aristocats not trained in the law, and felt unduly constrained by the legalistic demands of the Americans. In the period from the 1680s to about 1715. Numerous efforts were made to strengthen Royal control and diminish legal constraints on the power of the governors. Colonial lawyers fought back successfully. An important technique that developed especially in Boston, Philadelphia and New York in the 1720s and 1730s was to mobilize public opinion by using the new availability of weekly newspapers and print shops that produced inexpensive pamphlets. The lawyers use the publicity medium to disseminate ideas about American legal rights as Englishmen. By the 1750s and 1760s, however, there was a counter attack ridiculing and demeaning the lawyers as pettifoggers. Their image and influence declined. The lawyers of colonial New York organized a bar association, but it fell apart in 1768 during the bitter political dispute between the factions based in the Delancey and Livingston families. For the next century, various attempts were made, and failed, in New York state to build an effective organization of lawyers. Finally a Bar Association emerged in 1869 that proved successful and continues to operate. In all 13 colonies a prominent faction of the legal profession were Loyalists; their clientele was often tied to royal authority or British merchants and financiers. they were not allowed to practice unless they took a loyalty oath to the new United States of America. Many went to Britain or Canada after losing the war..

Becoming a lawyer

In the 18th and 19th centuries most young men became lawyers by studying in the office of an established lawyer, mixing clerical duties such as drawing up routine contracts and wills, together with the study of standard treatises. They then had to be admitted by the local bar in order to practice law. Frank B. Kellogg was unusually successful at this route, starting as a farm boy in Minnesota who dropped out of the local one-room school at age 14; he never attended high school, college or law school. He clerked for a lawyer who specialized in corporate law, and soon proved himself adept. He played a major role as special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General in one of the most famous decisions in corporate legal history, in which the Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil Corporation in 1911. His professional colleagues elected Kellogg president of the American Bar Association in 1912. After one term in the United States Senate, he became a diplomat as ambassador to Great Britain and as Secretary of State in 1925-29. He co-authored the world-famous Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize. The pact was signed by nearly all the nations of the world. It outlawed making war, and provided the legal foundation for the trial and execution of German and Japanese war criminals at the end of World War II.

Increasingly law school was the favored path. the first American law school was the Litchfield Law School, founded in a small town in Connecticut by Tapping Reeve. Between 1784 and its closure in 1833 it trained over 1000 young men, many of whom became leaders of the bar at the state level, or politicians at the state and national level. They included two vice presidents (Aaron Burr and John C Calhoun), as well as 101 members of the United States House of Representatives, 28 United States senators, six cabinet secretaries, three justices of the United States Supreme Court, 14 state governors and 13 state supreme court chief justices.

By the middle of the 19th century, there were over a hundred law schools in the country, most of them very small operations run as a sideline. "Any lawyer who had a permanent office and perhaps a handful of law books could...establish a law school of his own, advertise the fact in the local newspaper, admit whatever students would care to show up....It differed from the traditional 'office apprenticeship' only in that he chose to call it by the honorific name of 'law school.'" The most famous academic training program was the Harvard Law School, founded in 1817 as part of the University. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story was for decades its highly influential senior professor. Story's many compilations and law books established a national curriculum for local law schools. Even more influential was Christopher Columbus Langdell, Harvard's dean from 1870 to 1895. Instead of the usual practice of lectures every day, Langdale introduced the case system. The professor called on students to explain the legal reasoning behind specific cases, thereby teaching them to reason like judges. This case method spread rapidly to all law schools. By the 20th century, local bar associations required graduation from an accredited law school before a candidate could take the bar exam and begin practice. Small operations could not afford the necessary libraries and faculties, so they steadily disappeared. In 1900, there were 108,000 lawyers and judges, nearly all of them men.

White Shoe firms

In American slang, a "white shoe" business is an old established, high prestige, typically White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) institution. They hired very well-dressed men (occasionally wearing white buckskin shoes with red soles) with good family connections and new degrees from top-of-the-line law schools such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. They emerged in the late 19th century, and were usually based in New York or Boston or Philadelphia, where they catered to emerging major corporations. They were especially in demand from major railroads, that were built through complicated consolidations, and faced complex legal problems in multiple states. Previously, law firms were small operations with two or three partners and a handful of clerks. The new corporations were much too large, too complex, and spread over too many legal jurisdictions for a small firm. A key innovator was Paul Cravath, who made his reputation and handling complex lawsuits for the new electrical industry. He not only enlarged the law office but he professionalized it, with full-time professional librarians, with the recruiting system focused on leading law schools, and with partners who specialized in particular complex topics. A career system was set up whereby junior people were carefully hired, then were closely supervised by the senior partners, and after a half-dozen years either departed, or were made junior partners with the share of the firm's profits. Very few Jews were hired by the WASP forms, but they started their own. The WASP dominance ended when a number of major Jewish law firms attained elite status in dealing with top -ranked corporations. As late as 1950 there was not a single large Jewish law firm in New York City. However, by 1965 six of the 20 largest firms were Jewish; by 1980 four of the ten largest were Jewish.

For a list of White Shoe law firms see White-shoe firm#Law firms

See also

• History of the legal profession
• The American Lawyer, monthly magazine published since 1979
• The Green Bag, popular magazine for lawyers
• Jurist
• Law professor
• Law school in the United States
• Lawyer
• Legal education in the United States
• Legal profession
• List of law schools in the United States
• List of jurists
• Paralegal

Further reading

• Chroust, Anton-Hermann. The Rise of the Legal Profession in America (2 vol 1965), covers the colonial and early national period down to 1820.
• Friedman, Lawrence M. American Law in the twentieth century (Yale University Press, 2004) especially chapters 2 and 15 on the legal profession.
• Kaczorowski, Robert J. "Fordham University School of Law: A Case Study of Legal Education in Twentieth-Century America." Fordham Law Review 87 (2018): 861+. online
• McMorrow, Judith A. "Law and Lawyers in the US: The Hero-Villain Dichotomy." Boston College Law School Legal Studies Research Paper 213 (2010). online
• Newman, Roger K. The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law (2009)
• Oldman, Mark,ed. The Vault.com Guide to America's Top 50 Law Firms (1998)
• Oller, John. White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century (2019), excerpt
• Wald, Eli, "The rise and fall of the WASP and Jewish law firms." Stanford Law Review 60 (2007) pp. 1803-1866 online

Primary sources

• Wortman, Marlene Stein, ed. Women in American Law: From Colonial Times to the New Deal (1985), text of 163 documents

External links

• "Other Powerful Forces: A Brief Demographic History Of The Legal Profession"