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An Honest But Fearless Fighter: The Adversarial Ideal Of Public Defenders In 1930s And ’40s Los Angeles, Sara Mayeux

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Vercoe's self-description as a courtroom "fighter" illuminates public defenders' professional identity in the United States in the decades after the criminal courts had developed into a modem bureaucracy, but before the Warren Court constitutionalized criminal procedure. Historians have characterized lawyering for the poor as outside the mainstream of adversar- ial legal culture, describing a "two-tiered legal system" in which lawyers celebrated courtroom combat on behalf of paying clients but relegated the indigent to a lesser form of advocacy that valorized "compromise." Comporting with this characterization, legal scholars have portrayed early public defenders as "assembly-line" workers who conducted little factual investigation …