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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 court in order to practice law. [[Frank B. Kellogg]] (1856-1937) 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, [[Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States|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.<ref>Lewis Ethan Ellis, '' Frank B. Kellogg and American foreign relations, 1925-1929'' (1961).</ref>
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 court in order to practice law. [[Frank B. Kellogg]] (1856-1937) 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, [[Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States|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.<ref>Lewis Ethan Ellis, '' Frank B. Kellogg and American foreign relations, 1925-1929'' (1961).</ref>


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.<ref>Mark Boonshoft, "The Litchfield Network: Education, Social Capital, and the Rise and Fall of a Political Dynasty, 1784–1833." ''Journal of the Early Republic'' 34.4 (2014): 561-595. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/24486661 Online] </ref>
The apprenticeship system favored nepotism, as friends and relatives of lawyers tried to place their sons. One broadly open to the middle class were academic law schools. 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.<ref>Mark Boonshoft, "The Litchfield Network: Education, Social Capital, and the Rise and Fall of a Political Dynasty, 1784–1833." ''Journal of the Early Republic'' 34.4 (2014): 561-595. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/24486661 Online] </ref> by the 1860s, academic law schools tied to universities were increasingly popular. as typified by the University of Pennsylvania which opened its law department in 1850. <ref>Gary B. Nash, "The Philadelphia Bench and Bar, 1800–1861." ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'' 7.2 (1965): 203-220.</ref>


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.'"<ref>Anton-Hermann Chroust, ''Rise of the Legal Profession in America'' (1965), vol 2 pp 210, 220-21, quoting page 220.</ref> 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.<ref>Roger K. Newman, ''The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law'' (2009) pp 522-24.</ref> 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.<ref> Newman, ''The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law'' (2009) pp 323-24.</ref> This case method spread rapidly to all law schools.<ref>Anthony Chase, "The Birth of the Modern Law School," ''American Journal of Legal History'' (1979) 23#4 pp 329-348 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/844687 online]</ref> 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. <ref> Robert Bocking Stevens, ''Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s'' (2001).</ref> In 1900, there were 108,000 lawyers and judges, nearly all of them men.<ref>Lawrence M. Friedman, ''American Law in the Twentieth Century'' (2002) p. 29.</ref>
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.'"<ref>Anton-Hermann Chroust, ''Rise of the Legal Profession in America'' (1965), vol 2 pp 210, 220-21, quoting page 220.</ref>
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.<ref>Roger K. Newman, ''The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law'' (2009) pp 522-24.</ref> 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.<ref> Newman, ''The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law'' (2009) pp 323-24.</ref> This case method spread rapidly to all law schools.<ref>Anthony Chase, "The Birth of the Modern Law School," ''American Journal of Legal History'' (1979) 23#4 pp 329-348 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/844687 online]</ref> 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. <ref> Robert Bocking Stevens, ''Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s'' (2001).</ref> In 1900, there were 108,000 lawyers and judges, nearly all of them men.<ref>Lawrence M. Friedman, ''American Law in the Twentieth Century'' (2002) p. 29.</ref>


Local bar associations before 1870 were basically social groups, which took little or no responsibility for maintaining quality of admission or performance by the membership. In 1870 leading lawyers in Manhattan organized the [[New York City Bar Association|"Association of the Bar of the City of New York"]] to battle the notorious political corruption of the Tweed machine, and emerged as a powerful organization. It became a model, and in the 1870s eight cities and eight statewide associations were in operation. By 1890 there were 20 state bar associations, 40 by 1900, and 48 by 1916. By 1890 there were 159 bar association's at the local level, and over 1100 by 1930. They still performed social functions, but were increasingly called upon to organize, discipline and professionalize the lawyers, and fight off the long-standing hostility and ridicule toward the legal profession. <ref> Willard Hurst, ''The Growth of American Law '' (1950) pp 285-89. </ref> An an important priority for the states and for the national American Bar Association was control of the state bar examinations, and the steady increase in the requirements for law schools, regarding strength of curriculum, library facilities, and availability of full-time faculty.<ref>Vern Countryman, et al. ''The lawyer in modern society'' (1976) pp 699-766.</ref>
Local bar associations before 1870 were basically social groups, which took little or no responsibility for maintaining quality of admission or performance by the membership. In 1870 leading lawyers in Manhattan organized the [[New York City Bar Association|"Association of the Bar of the City of New York"]] to battle the notorious political corruption of the Tweed machine, and emerged as a powerful organization. It became a model, and in the 1870s eight cities and eight statewide associations were in operation. By 1890 there were 20 state bar associations, 40 by 1900, and 48 by 1916. By 1890 there were 159 bar association's at the local level, and over 1100 by 1930. They still performed social functions, but were increasingly called upon to organize, discipline and professionalize the lawyers, and fight off the long-standing hostility and ridicule toward the legal profession. <ref> Willard Hurst, ''The Growth of American Law '' (1950) pp 285-89. </ref> An an important priority for the states and for the national American Bar Association was control of the state bar examinations, and the steady increase in the requirements for law schools, regarding strength of curriculum, library facilities, and availability of full-time faculty.<ref>Vern Countryman, et al. ''The lawyer in modern society'' (1976) pp 699-766.</ref>

Revision as of 02:18, 26 March 2019

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 served the legal system as justices of the peace, paralegals, marshalls and other aides.

Colonial America

Eagle Legal procedures in 17th century America were quite informal, with judges discussing issues directly with the people involved in the case. Every man his own lawyer, but that benefits him with a natural talented and handicapped many more. The solution was to hire a talented lawyer. By 1700, therefore the judges and their procedures in court had become much more formal, and to win a case a client needed a lawyer to handle the arguments, cite the precedents, and neutralize the opposition lawyer. unlike in England, where there was an elaborate hierarchy of judges, barristers, and solicitors with elaborate formal qualifications, American lawyers were Jacks of all trades who learned their skills by apprenticeship and by closely watching court procedures.[1] Colonial legislatures passed laws to fix the fees lawyers could charge for standardized procedures; the fees were always relatively low. For the ambitious lawyers, the solution was a high volume of cases speedily handled. Provincial courts usually made a circuit between the different counties, spending a few days in each county seat. Each attorney might be handling 30 to 40 cases in three or four days. The great majority of cases dealt with debts, which were speedily handled. Occasionally there were land disputes, which were much more complicated and time-consuming because they required searches in legal titles, which were poorly indexed. Bystanders attended for the sport of watching the high-speed, high drama cases play out every few minutes. The lawyers thereby collected a steady stream of income every month, quite unlike the merchants, planters and farmers who depended on seasonal sales, or long-term trading voyages that lasted many months of the time. Becoming familiar with the intimate economic details in the vicinity, lawyers could take advantage of bargains and did so., Building up their wealth, and also their connections that made for a political base. They were highly flexible and had the time and opportunity to hold local offices, most of which paid poorly but some of which were quite generous. Decade by decade the lawyers emerged as one of the highest income groups, with the widest range of contacts.[2][3]

In New York City at first, legal practitioners were full-time businessmen and merchants, with no legal training, who had watched a few court proceedings, and mostly use their own common sense together with snippets they had picked up about English law. Court proceedings were quite informal, for the judges and no more training than the attorneys. By the 1760s, the situation had dramatically changed. Lawyers were essential to the rapidly growing international trade, dealing with questions of partnerships, contracts, and insurance. The sums of money involved were large, and hiring an incompetent lawyer was a very expensive proposition. Lawyers were now professionally trained, and conversant in a extremely complex language that combine highly specific legal terms and motions with a dose of Latin. Court proceedings became a baffling mystery to the ordinary layman. Lawyers became more specialized and built their reputation, and their fee schedule, on the basis of their reputation for success. But as their status, wealth and power rose, animosity grew even faster.[4]

Professional lawyers were not loved anywhere in colonial America. Every family had stories of how they had been cheated in this case or that one by devious opposition lawyers.[5] Roscoe Pound says flatly, "Lawyers as a class were very unpopular in the colonies."[6] The lawyers tried to raise their professional standards by forming local bar associations, but had little success in the anything-goes colonial era. Full professionalization would wait until after the Civil War.[7]

Lawyers and politics

The British governors were upper class aristocrats 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.[8] By the 1750s and 1760s, however, there was a counter attack ridiculing and demeaning the lawyers as pettifoggers. Their image and influence declined.[9] 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.[10]

The American Revolution saw the departure of many leading lawyers, and the arrival in high office of even more younger lawyers. In most of the 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 law unless they took a loyalty oath to the new United States of America. Many went to Britain or Canada after losing the war.[11]. Nevertheless, the lawyers who remained had a major impact on shaping the new nation. they comprised 45 percent of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, 69 percent of the forty-five members of the Constitutional Convention, and 40 percent of the twenty-five Senators in the new Congress that opened in 1789, as well as 26 percent of the sixty-five Representatives.[12]

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 court in order to practice law. Frank B. Kellogg (1856-1937) 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.[13]

The apprenticeship system favored nepotism, as friends and relatives of lawyers tried to place their sons. One broadly open to the middle class were academic law schools. 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.[14] by the 1860s, academic law schools tied to universities were increasingly popular. as typified by the University of Pennsylvania which opened its law department in 1850. [15]

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.'"[16]

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.[17] 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.[18] This case method spread rapidly to all law schools.[19] 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. [20] In 1900, there were 108,000 lawyers and judges, nearly all of them men.[21]

Local bar associations before 1870 were basically social groups, which took little or no responsibility for maintaining quality of admission or performance by the membership. In 1870 leading lawyers in Manhattan organized the "Association of the Bar of the City of New York" to battle the notorious political corruption of the Tweed machine, and emerged as a powerful organization. It became a model, and in the 1870s eight cities and eight statewide associations were in operation. By 1890 there were 20 state bar associations, 40 by 1900, and 48 by 1916. By 1890 there were 159 bar association's at the local level, and over 1100 by 1930. They still performed social functions, but were increasingly called upon to organize, discipline and professionalize the lawyers, and fight off the long-standing hostility and ridicule toward the legal profession. [22] An an important priority for the states and for the national American Bar Association was control of the state bar examinations, and the steady increase in the requirements for law schools, regarding strength of curriculum, library facilities, and availability of full-time faculty.[23]

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 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.[24] 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.[25]

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

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: the democratic experience (1958) pp 195-202.
  2. ^ Gary B. Nash, Class and society in early America (1970) pp 130-131.
  3. ^ James A. Henretta, The evolution of American society, 1700-1815 (1973) pp 207-208.
  4. ^ Milton M. Klein, Milton M. "From Community to Status: The Development of the Legal Profession in Colonial New York." New York History 60.2 (1979): 133.
  5. ^ Gerard W. Gawalt, "Sources of Anti-Lawyer Sentiment in Massachusetts," American Journal of Legal History 14 (October 1970) pp 283-307.
  6. ^ Roscoe Pound, "Legal Profession in America," 19 Notre Dame Law Review (1944) at p 334 online
  7. ^ Albert P. Blaustein, "New York Bar Associations Prior to 1870." American Journal of Legal History 12.1 (1968): 50-57.
  8. ^ Gregory Afinogenov, "Lawyers and Politics in Eighteenth-Century New York." New York History 89.2 (2008): 142-162. online
  9. ^ Luke J. Feder, "'No Lawyer in the Assembly!": Character Politics and the Election of 1768 in New York City." New York History 95.2 (2014): 154-171. online
  10. ^ Albert P. Blaustein, "New York Bar Associations Prior to 1870." American Journal of Legal History 12.1 (1968): 50-57. online
  11. ^ Anton-Hermann Chroust, The rise of the legal profession in America (1965) vol 2:3-11
  12. ^ Anton-Hermann Chroust, "American Legal Profession: Its Agony and Ecstasy (1776-1840)." Notre Dame Law. 46 (1970): 487+ online.
  13. ^ Lewis Ethan Ellis, Frank B. Kellogg and American foreign relations, 1925-1929 (1961).
  14. ^ Mark Boonshoft, "The Litchfield Network: Education, Social Capital, and the Rise and Fall of a Political Dynasty, 1784–1833." Journal of the Early Republic 34.4 (2014): 561-595. Online
  15. ^ Gary B. Nash, "The Philadelphia Bench and Bar, 1800–1861." Comparative Studies in Society and History 7.2 (1965): 203-220.
  16. ^ Anton-Hermann Chroust, Rise of the Legal Profession in America (1965), vol 2 pp 210, 220-21, quoting page 220.
  17. ^ Roger K. Newman, The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law (2009) pp 522-24.
  18. ^ Newman, The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law (2009) pp 323-24.
  19. ^ Anthony Chase, "The Birth of the Modern Law School," American Journal of Legal History (1979) 23#4 pp 329-348 online
  20. ^ Robert Bocking Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (2001).
  21. ^ Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law in the Twentieth Century (2002) p. 29.
  22. ^ Willard Hurst, The Growth of American Law (1950) pp 285-89.
  23. ^ Vern Countryman, et al. The lawyer in modern society (1976) pp 699-766.
  24. ^ John Oller, White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century (2019) ch. 1.
  25. ^ Eli Wald, "The rise and fall of the WASP and Jewish law firms." Stanford Law Review 60 (2007): 1803-1866; discrimination p. 1838 and statistics page 1805.

Further reading

  • Bloomfield, Maxwell. American Lawyers in a Changing Society: 1776 – 1876 (1976).
  • Chroust, Anton-Hermann. The Rise of the Legal Profession in America (2 vol 1965), covers the colonial and early national period down to the 1820s.
    • Chroust. "Legal Profession in Colonial America." Notre Dame Law 33 (1957): 51+. online
    • Chroust, "American Legal Profession: Its Agony and Ecstasy (1776-1840)." Notre Dame Law. 46 (1970): 487+ online.
  • Friedman, Lawrence M. American Law in the twentieth century (Yale UP, 2004) especially chapters 2 and 15 on the legal profession.
  • Gawalt, Gerard W. ed. The New High Priests: Lawyers in Post–Civil War America (1984). online
  • Gawalt, Gerard W. The Promise of Power: The Emergence of the Legal Profession in Massachusetts, 1760-1840 (1979).
  • Gawalt, Gerard W. "Sources of Anti-Lawyer Sentiment in Massachusetts," American Journal of Legal History 14 (October 1970) :283-307.
  • 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
  • Nash, Gary. "The Philadelphia Bench and Bar, 1800–1860," Comparative Studies in Society and History 7 (1965):203-20.
  • 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
  • Power, Roscoe. "Legal Profession in America," 19 Notre Dame Law Review (1944) pp 334+ online<
  • 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
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