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Comment: The Texas Bar In The Nineteenth Century, Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau Jan 1979

Comment: The Texas Bar In The Nineteenth Century, Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau

Vanderbilt Law Review

Maxwell H. Bloomfield's Article, "The Texas Bar in the Nineteenth Century," presents an ingenious collage of information derived from more or less standard kinds of secondary works, interspersed with excerpts from the diary of a Texas lawyer and the brotherly correspondence of another, and highlighted with statistical data from the manuscript censuses of 1850, 1860, and 1900.Although the evidence centers on Galveston, the careers of William Pitt Ballinger and Alfred Howell, and the Texas Bar Association movement, Professor Bloomfield's skill in creating a series of vignettes leaves us with impressions of the entire bar for fifty years of what was …


The Texas Bar In The Nineteenth Century, Maxwell Bloomfield Jan 1979

The Texas Bar In The Nineteenth Century, Maxwell Bloomfield

Vanderbilt Law Review

As the twentieth century approached, bar leaders increasingly complained that the open bar, like the open range, had outlived its usefulness. In 1899 the Texas Bar Association began a vigorous lobbying effort for more restrictive regulation of attorneys. The state legislature responded four years later with a bill that required all future bar candidates to take a standardized written examination.The results of this new approach were immediate and gratifying to those who clamored for a more exclusive profession. While approximately four hundred candidates had applied for, and obtained, a license between August 1, 1896, and August 1, 1897, only ninety …