American Bar Association. The American Bar Association (ABA) was founded in 1878 in Saratoga Springs, New York, as a voluntary, national organization of the
legal profession. Its initial membership totaled 289 lawyers, and its purposes included advancing
jurisprudence, elevating professional standards, promoting the administration of justice and uniformity of law, improving legal education, and facilitating exchanges among lawyers. The principal founder was Simeon Eben Baldwin, a distinguished attorney from New Haven, Connecticut, who served as a state supreme court justice and as governor of Connecticut. The ABA's early accomplishments included proposing intermediate courts of appeal, which relieved the
Supreme Court of the United States of a long backlog of cases, and creating the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws.
During the early decades of the twentieth century, the ABA expanded its membership, adopted codes of ethics for lawyers and judges, established standards for professional legal education, promoted the independence of the judiciary, and, in 1936, adopted a new constitution making it a more representative organization. ABA Presidents during these years included Elihu Root, secretary of war under President Theodore
Roosevelt; President William Howard
Taft; and Charles Evans
Hughes.
Experiencing rapid growth in the mid‐1900s, the ABA addressed issues ranging from President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's controversial Supreme Court reorganization plan to the
civil rights movement. During this time, the ABA also began reviewing the qualifications of federal judicial nominees and supporting newly created federal legal‐services programs. Robert G. Story (executive trial counsel at the Nuremberg war crimes trials), and Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell were among the ABA Presidents of this era.
In the later twentieth century, the ABA functioned as a strong advocate for the rule of law at home and abroad, and ABA representatives provided free legal assistance to emerging democracies in central and eastern Europe. During the
Watergate controversy, the ABA emphasized the supremacy of the law, even in cases involving the nation's highest public officials. Other critical issues addressed during this period included tort reform, alternative means of dispute resolution, and judicial independence. ABA Presidents in these years included Leon Jaworski and Lawrence Walsh, special prosecutors in the
Watergate and
Iran‐Contra Affair investigations, respectively, and Roberta Cooper Ramo, the first woman to head the organization. In 1998, the ABA elected Robert Grey as the first African American to chair its policy‐making body, the House of Delegates. As the twentieth century ended, the ABA's membership approached 400,000.
Bibliography
James Grafton Rogers , American Bar Leaders: Biographies of Presidents of the American Bar Association, 1878–1928, 1932.
Gerald Carson , A Good Day at Saratoga, 1978.
Norman Gross
