IN THIS ISSUE

History of the Legal Profession in the U.S.

In the colonial period of American history, there were no law schools, and training to become a lawyer had not been formalized. Some trained by apprenticing with other lawyers, but there was no requirement to do so. According to Lawrence Friedman’s History of American Law, Puritan New England felt ambivalence toward the legal profession. “The legal profession, with its special privileges and principles, its private, esoteric language, seemed an obstacle to efficient or godly government.” Nevertheless, the need for lawyers increased as the country grew. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, there were nearly 500 attorneys in Massachusetts alone. By the middle of the century, there were around 24,000 attorneys, and by the end of the century the number had swelled to over 100,000.

While the number of attorneys grew, the attitudes toward them worsened. By 1838, many of the apprenticeship requirements no longer existed. One did not need to be an apprentice to practice in the Indiana Territory, Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee or South Carolina. In the North, Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire had abolished these requirements as well. In 1800, 14 of the 19 jurisdictions required apprenticeship training, but as the United States entered the Civil War, only nine of 39 jurisdictions maintained those requirements. In 1840, only nine law schools had university affiliations, though this was soon to change.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and with banking and financial institutions in ascendance, Wall Street firms proliferated. Many of the attorneys hired for these firms were informally segregated on the basis of nationality, religion and race with the majority of these attorneys being Anglo-Saxon Protestants. George Ruffin became, in 1868, the first African American to graduate from a U.S. law school. Ruffin had moved from Virginia where it was illegal to teach African Americans to read or write. Ruffin attended Harvard University.

Women faced barriers to the practice of law as well. The first female attorney in the United States, Margaret Brent, re-

ceived “honorary male” status under which she was addressed as “Gentleman Margaret Brent”. Howard University in Washington, D.C., awarded the first law degree to a woman in 1872. Iowa became the first state to admit women to practice law a few years earlier, in 1867.

With the influx of immigrants from Europe in the late nineteenth century, the children of those immigrants viewed the law as an opportunity for advancement in their new country. In response, the more elite law schools – Harvard, Columbia and other Ivy League schools – revised their curriculum to reflect legal theory and an academic knowledge of the law rather than one based on the practice of the law. The attorney and diarist George T. Strong, a Columbia College graduate, advocated for stricter admissions standards for law schools. Strong wrote, “either a college diploma, or an examination including Latin. This will keep out the little scrubs (German Jew boys mostly) whom the school now promotes from grocery-counters...to be ‘gentlemen of the Bar.’” Unfortunately, anti-immigrant sentiment manifested in the criteria for admission to the American Bar Association at this time too. The ABA employed subjective criteria such as “moral character” to keep many ethnic groups from membership in the organization.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, the ABA founded the National Conference of Bar Examiners which effectively eliminated the apprentice system. The baby boom following World War II and the need for specialized attorneys resulted in further growth of the legal profession and legal education. By the end of the twentieth century, the number of law schools grew to 178. There are currently 204 ABA-accredited law schools in the United States.

According to an October 2020 report published on Statista. com, the legal industry will generate nearly $350 billion in 2020. By every objective measure, the legal profession is thriving and will continue to be a significant element in American society for years to come.