Legal History Commons^™

The Mystery Of The Leavenworth Oaths, M H. Hoeflich, Stephen M. Sheppard

Faculty Articles

Lawyers have sworn an oath to be admitted to the Bar since the beginnings of the Anglo-American legal profession. The oath serves several extremely important purposes. First, it is the formal act that admits an individual into the Bar and confers upon the oath taker the right to perform the duties of an attorney in the jurisdiction in which the oath is given. Second, the oath admits the new attorney to the broader world of the legal profession and signifies that the new attorney has been judged by the oath giver as worthy of the right to practice law. Third, …

Edward Barradall's Reports Of Cases In The General Court Of Virginia (1733-1741), William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

Edward Barradall was born in London, the son of Henry Barradall and Catherine Blumfield Barradall. He was baptized on 17 October 1703 in the parish church of St. Paul's, Covent Garden. Both of his brothers and two of his sisters came to Virginia in the 1730s. Edward Barradall was in Virginia by February 1731. From at least then until about 1733, he practiced law in the county courts of Caroline County and the Northern Neck. His law reports begin in 1733, and so it is to be presumed that that is the year he moved his practice from the county …

The Fall Of An American Lawyer, Michael Ariens

Faculty Articles

John Randall is the only former president of the American Bar Association to be disbarred. He wrote a will for a client, Lovell Myers, with whom Randall had been in business for over a quarter-century. The will left all of Myers’s property to Randall, and implicitly disinherited his only child, Marie Jensen. When Jensen learned of the existence of a will, she sued to set it aside. She later filed a complaint with the Iowa Committee on Professional Ethics and Conduct. That complaint was the catalyst leading to Randall’s disbarment.

Randall had acted grievously in serving as Lovell Myers’s attorney. …

Of Sheepdogs And Ventriloquists: Government Lawyers In Two New Deal Agencies, Daniel R. Ernst

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

From the neo-Weberian literature on state-building and the political sociology of the legal profession, one might expect government lawyers to be sheepdogs, nipping at the heels of straying administrators, supplying their agencies with the bureaucratic autonomy so often missing in American government. In this contribution to “Serious Fun” a symposium in honor of John Henry Schlegel of the University at Buffalo School of Law, I report my preliminary findings for two agencies created during the Hundred Days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the National Recovery Administration. I suggest that the neo-Weberian model tends to minimize …

The Shallow State: The Federal Communications Commission And The New Deal, Daniel R. Ernst

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

American lawyers and law professors commonly turn to the New Deal for insights into the law and politics of today’s administrative state. Usually, they have looked to agencies created in the 1930s that became the foundation of the postwar political order. Some have celebrated these agencies; others have deplored them as the core of an elitist, antidemocratic Deep State. This article takes a different tack by studying the Federal Communications Commission, an agency created before the New Deal. For most of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first two presidential terms, the FCC languished within the “Shallow State,” bossed about by patronage-seeking politicians, …

What Gideon Did, Sara Mayeux

All Faculty Scholarship

Many accounts of Gideon v. Wainwright’s legacy focus on what Gideon did not do—its doctrinal and practical limits. For constitutional theorists, Gideon imposed a preexisting national consensus upon a few “outlier” states, and therefore did not represent a dramatic doctrinal shift. For criminal procedure scholars, advocates, and journalists, Gideon has failed, in practice, to guarantee meaningful legal help for poor people charged with crimes.

Drawing on original historical research, this Article instead chronicles what Gideon did—the doctrinal and institutional changes it inspired between 1963 and the early 1970s. Gideon shifted the legal profession’s policy consensus on indigent defense away from …

Timeline Of African-American Legal History In Nevada (1861-2011), Rachel J. Anderson

Scholarly Works

For the first time in Nevada history, this timeline depicts selected events in the history of African-American lawyers, civil rights, and diversity in Nevada's bar and bench. It includes many historically significant pictures and is part of a special Black History Month issue of the Nevada Lawyer, the official publication of the State Bar of Nevada. That issue highlights the achievements and contributions of African-American lawyers in Nevada in honor of the 51st anniversary of the first African American (Charles L. Kellar) passing the Nevada state bar examination, the 48th anniversary of the first two African Americans admitted to the …

Fighting For The City In Context: William Nelson And The Legal History Of New York, William P. Lapiana

Articles & Chapters

Professor Ross Sandler has contributed a full review of Fighting for the City to this symposium issue. This short comment is meant to supplement that review by emphasizing topics that are of particular interest to an historian of the American legal profession, and of American legal education in particular and New York City in general. It is also meant to draw some connections between Fighting for the City and two of Professor William Nelson's other works: In Pursuit of Right and Justice, his biography of Edward Weinfeld, a lawyer and judge of the District Court for theSouthern District of New …

A Short History Of Poverty Lawyers In The United States, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

No abstract provided.

Not So Great Moments In Trial Advocacy: Clement Vallandigham, Richard H. Underwood

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The subject of this comment is "The Lawyer as Hero." Being the contrarian that I am, I thought I would present the story of someone who I do not consider to have been a hero—Clement L. Vallandigham. History has not been kind to him. I am sure those of you who do remember his name think of him as a traitor and a rascal—a loathsome individual. But to some, and for a time, he was a hero and a champion in court. This just goes to show that one person's hero is another person's goat.

Learning More Than Law From Maryland Decisions, Ian Gallacher

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.