The Bar and Its Works

This chapter discusses the bar, covering its organization, legal education, and the legal literature of the law. The bar was open to almost all men in a technical sense. But class and background did make a difference. Jacksonian ideology should not be taken at face value. The bar was, for one thing, somewhat stratified, even in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is a tremendous social distance between a Wall Street partner on the one hand, and on the other hand, lawyers who scrambled for a living at the bottom of the heap. Lawyers from wealthy or professional backgrounds were far more likely to reach the heights than lawyers from working-class homes. In 1800 and 1850, there were no large law firms, and hardly any firms at all.