Internal Legal Culture in the Twentieth Century: Lawyers, Judges, and Law Books

This chapter discusses changes in the legal profession in the twentieth century, covering legal ethics, the organized bar, legal education, legal literature, and the twentieth century bench. The dominant theme of the twentieth century was growth, and nowhere was this more evident that in the legal profession itself. At the beginning of the century, there were some 100,000 lawyers in the country. At the end of the century, there were about a million—the population had more or less doubled, but the number of lawyers had increased by a factor of ten. This growth process had accelerated in the last part of the century; in the early 1980s, there were about 600,000 lawyers—400,000 more joined their ranks in the next generation.