Legal Profession

Legal Profession. Lawyers are disproportionately represented in the political branches of American government and hold a virtual monopoly over the judiciary. The extraordinary legal cast of the American Revolution first gave prominence to the idea that lawyers were the high priests of America's civic religion of law. Yet a populist ethic scorning them as money grubbers who mystified the law while profiting from the miseries of others has persisted.

The early bar responded to these concerns with a combination of formal legal education and self‐policing. Tapping Reeve in 1784 founded the Litchfield Law School in Connecticut, which trained more than one thousand lawyers before it closed in 1833. Yet most nineteenth‐century lawyers prepared for law practice by serving an apprenticeship with an established attorney or judge. Their reading included Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story's famous Commentaries, which first appeared in the 1830s.

Nevertheless, by 1870 the United States had thirty‐five law schools. Business corporations seeking specialized legal talent provided the impetus for some of this growth. Paul D. Cravath of New York City in the 1890s pioneered the factory system of law practice. Although lawyers in these large firms (five or more persons) were an infinitesimal percentage of all lawyers in the country, they garnered a disproportionate share of the financial rewards. During the twentieth century, the practice of law turned into a gigantic business, with more than 250 firms of one hundred or more lawyers commanding about 40 percent of the nation's total legal revenues.

The bar‐association movement also grew rapidly at the end of the nineteenth century. The American Bar Association (ABA), founded in 1878 by Judge Simeon E. Baldwin, advocated higher standards for practitioners. The ABA and local associations attempted to elevate quality by limiting access, especially of the foreign born, women, and racial minorities.

Despite opposition, however, all of these groups gradually joined the profession. Night law schools accommodated the rising tide of immigrants and other daytime workers seeking a career at the bar. Women's exclusion from the profession continued longer because the men who dominated it believed women's proper place was in the home, a cultural bias sustained by the Supreme Court in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873). By 1997, however, women constituted about 24 percent of all lawyers, up from 2.5 percent in 1950, and about half of all law school graduates. The number of African American lawyers also increased, though less dramatically. In 1997, when African Americans constituted 12 percent of the population, they represented about 7 percent of law graduates but only 3 percent of the bar. Women and all minorities remained distinctly under‐represented as partners in large law firms at the end of the twentieth century.

Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell of Harvard Law School introduced in the 1870s the most enduring reforms in legal education. Langdell's “scientific” method involved formal entrance requirements, the case method of teaching, core subjects, large libraries filled with state and national reports, and law reviews edited by law students.

Langdell's method survived, but his assumptions came under attack, first from advocates of “sociological jurisprudence,” including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis, and then in the 1930s and 1940s from the Legal Realists, who insisted on measuring the law's success by its social consequences rather than its scientific logic. Some of the Realists, such as Jerome Frank, moved into the New Deal as lawyers, where they became the vanguard of a new segment of the profession—the government lawyers—and the regulators of consumer safety, occupational health, civil rights, and environmental matters.

This commitment to law as an instrument of social policy produced a surge in the number of lawyers. In 1960 there were 286,000 lawyers in the United States; in 1997 the number was almost 1 million, or roughly one lawyer for every 250 people, a ratio unrivaled in American history and in the rest of the world. The nation's 175 law schools continued to turn out many thousands more each year. Moreover, the Supreme Court's decision in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona (1977)—that bar‐association codes against lawyer advertising violated lawyers' First Amendment rights to commercial free speech—opened the legal market to more competition.

As the twentieth century ended, the American legal profession was more diverse, more influential, and more embedded in popular consciousness than ever before. As interest in the profession soared, however, these high priests of America's civic religion frequently exhibited feet of clay. The reputational ranking of lawyers sank along with President Richard M. Nixon and his lawyer‐laden staff during the Watergate crisis and in the aftermath of celebrity cases such as the 1995 murder trial of the football star O.J. Simpson. Lawyers, it sometimes seemed, had become the profession that Americans loved to hate but could not live without.
See also Federal Government, Judicial Branch; Jurisprudence; New Deal Era, The; Professionalization; Shaw, Lemuel.

Bibliography

Wayne K. Hobson , The American Legal Profession and the Organizational Society, 1890–1930, 1986.
Peter Irons , New Deal Lawyers, 1982.
Robert Stevens , Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s, 1983.
Kermit L. Hall , The Magic Mirror: Law in American History, 1989.
Jennifer L. Pierce , Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms, 1995.
American Bar Association , Miles to Go: Progress of Minorities in the Legal Profession, 1998.

Kermit L. Hall