The history of the American legal profession covers the work, training, and professional activities of lawyers from the colonial era to the present. Lawyers grew increasingly powerful in the colonial era as experts in the English common law, which was adopted by the colonies. By the 21st century, over one million practitioners in the United States held law degrees, and many others served the legal system as justices of the peace, paralegals, marshals, and other aides.
Colonial era From their inception, the American colonies followed the English common law tradition. Legal procedures in the 17th century were quite informal, with judges discussing issues directly with the people involved in the case. Citizens generally represented themselves, which resulted in benefits to some and disadvantages to others. The solution was to hire a professional lawyer. By 1700, both judges and judicial procedures had become much more formal; to win a case, a client needed a lawyer to handle the arguments, cite the precedents, and neutralize the opposing counsel. While England still kept an elaborate hierarchy of judges, barristers and solicitors with formal qualifications, colonial lawyers were '"Jacks of all trades" who learned their skills by apprenticeship and by closely watching court procedures.Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: the democratic experience (1958) pp 195–202. Colonial legislatures passed laws to fix the fees lawyers could charge for standardized procedures and maintain these fees relatively low. This often led some lawyers to handle a high volume of cases more speedily. Provincial courts usually made a circuit between the different counties, spending a few days in each county seat. Each attorney might handle thirty to forty cases in three or four days. The great majority of cases dealt with debts, which were quickly handled. Occasionally, there were land disputes, which were much more complicated and time-consuming because they required searches in legal titles, which were poorly indexed. This set them apart from the merchants, planters, and farmers who depended on seasonal sales or long-term trading voyages. Lawyers in Maryland accumulated large private libraries and chambers where they discussed legal matters with clients and trained their understudies.Douglass, John E. “Between Pettifoggers and Professionals: Pleaders and Practitioners and the Beginnings of The Legal Profession in Colonial Maryland 1634-1731.” The American Journal of Legal History, vol. 39, no. 3, 1995, pp. 381–84. JSTOR website Retrieved 19 Aug. 2025. By becoming familiar with the intimate economic details of the counties, lawyers could take advantage of bargains. The close-knit nature of the profession also allowed them to build up their wealth, connections, and political base. They were highly flexible and had the time and opportunity to hold local offices in the public service, most of which paid poorly, but some of which were quite generous. Decade by decade, lawyers emerged as one of the highest income groups, with a wide range of contacts.Gary B. Nash, Class and society in early America (1970) pp 130–131.James A. Henretta, The evolution of American society, 1700–1815 (1973) pp 207–208.
In New York City during colonial times, legal practitioners were full-time businessmen and merchants with no legal training. Instead, they would watch court proceedings and piece them together with snippets of English law. Court proceedings were informal, for the judges had no more training than the attorneys. By the 1760s, the situation had dramatically changed. Lawyers were essential to the rapidly growing international trade, dealing with questions of partnerships, contracts, and insurance. The sums of money involved were large, and hiring an incompetent lawyer was a very expensive proposition. Lawyers were now professionally trained, and conversant in an extremely complex language that combined highly specific legal terms and motions with a dose of Latin. Court proceedings became a baffling to ordinary laymen. Lawyers became more specialized and built their fee schedule on the basis of their reputation for success. As their status, wealth, and power rose, animosity followed.Milton M. Klein, Milton M. "From Community to Status: The Development of the Legal Profession in Colonial New York." New York History 60.2 (1979): 133.
Professional lawyers were not widely loved in the colonies. Families would often share stories of being deceived or cheated by devious attorneys.Gerard W. Gawalt, "Sources of Anti-Lawyer Sentiment in Massachusetts," American Journal of Legal History 14 (October 1970) pp 283–307. Roscoe Pound flatly says, "Lawyers as a class were very unpopular in the colonies."Roscoe Pound, "Legal Profession in America," 19 Notre Dame Law Review (1944) at p 334 online Lawyers thus tried to raise their professional standards by forming local bar associations, but had little success in the colonial era. Full professionalization would not become standardized until after the Civil War.Albert P. Blaustein, "New York Bar Associations Prior to 1870." American Journal of Legal History 12.1 (1968): 50–57.
Lawyers and politics The British governors were upper class aristocrats appointed into their positions not trained in the law and felt unduly constrained by the legalistic demands of U.S. lawyers. From the 1680s to 1715, numerous efforts were made to strengthen Royal control and diminish legal constraints over the power of the governors. Colonial lawyers successfully resisted. An important technique that developed in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York in the 1720s and 1730s was to mobilize public opinion by using the new availability of weekly newspapers and print shops that produced inexpensive pamphlets. Lawyers would use this publicity to disseminate ideas about legal rights in the U.S. as Englishmen.Gregory Afinogenov, "Lawyers and Politics in Eighteenth-Century New York." New York History 89.2 (2008): 142–162. online By the 1750s and 1760s, however, there was a counter-attack ridiculing and demeaning the lawyers as pettifoggers. Their image and influence declined as a consequence.Luke J. Feder, "'No Lawyer in the Assembly!": Character Politics and the Election of 1768 in New York City." New York History 95.2 (2014): 154–171. online The lawyers of colonial New York organized a bar association, but it fell apart in 1768 during the bitter political dispute between factions from the Delancey and Livingston families. Over the next century, there were various unsuccessful attempts in New York to build an effective organization of lawyers. Finally, a Bar Association emerged in 1869 that proved successful and continues to operate.Albert P. Blaustein, "New York Bar Associations Prior to 1870." American Journal of Legal History 12.1 (1968): 50–57. online
The United States Revolution saw the departure of many leading lawyers, and the arrival in high offices of even younger lawyers. In most of the 13 colonies, a prominent faction of the legal profession were Loyalists, as their clients were often tied to royal authority or British merchants and financiers. After the revolution, they were not allowed to practice law unless they took a loyalty oath to the new United States of America. Many went to Britain or Canada after losing the war.Anton-Hermann Chroust, The rise of the legal profession in America (1965) vol 2:3–11 Nevertheless, the lawyers who remained had a major impact on shaping the new nation. Lawyers comprised 45 percent of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, 69 percent of the forty-five members of the Constitutional Convention, and 40 percent of the twenty-five senators in the new Congress that opened in 1789, as well as 26 percent of the sixty-five representatives.Anton-Hermann Chroust, "American Legal Profession: Its Agony and Ecstasy (1776–1840)." Notre Dame Law. 46 (1970): 487+ online.
Becoming a lawyer In the 18th and 19th centuries, most young people became lawyers by apprenticing in the office of an established lawyer, where they would engage in clerical duties such as drawing up routine contracts and wills, while studying standard treatises; this became known as reading law. The apprentice would then have to be admitted to the local court in order to practice law. Frank B. Kellogg (1856-1937) is an unusually successful example of this route. Starting as a farm boy in Minnesota who dropped out of the local one-room school at age 14, he never attended high school, college, or law school. He clerked for a lawyer who specialized in corporate law, and soon proved himself adept. He played a major role as special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General in one of the most famous decisions in corporate legal history, in which the Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil Corporation in 1911. His professional colleagues elected Kellogg president of the American Bar Association in 1912. After one term in the United States Senate, he became a diplomat as ambassador to Great Britain and as Secretary of State in 1925–29. He co-authored the world-famous Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize. The pact was signed by nearly all nations recognized at the time. It outlawed making war, and provided the legal foundation for the trial and execution of German and Japanese war criminals at the end of World War II.Lewis Ethan Ellis, Frank B. Kellogg and American foreign relations, 1925-1929 (1961).
While apprenticing, apprentices would read legal texts. Sometimes they would study on their own by reading legal texts without an apprenticeship.
The apprenticeship system favored nepotism, as friends and relatives of lawyers tried to place theirs offspring in these positions. An alternative more broadly open to the middle class was to attend academic law schools. The College of William and Mary set up the first chair in law in 1779, 21 years after the first such chair was established in England.Fred B. Devitt Jr., "William and Mary: America's First Law School," 2 William and Mary Law Review 424 (1960), online The first independent law school was the Litchfield Law School, founded in 1782 in Connecticut by Tapping Reeve. Between 1784 and its closure in 1833, it trained over 1000 young lawyers, many of whom became leaders of the bar at the state level, or politicians at the state and national level. Alumni included two vice presidents (Aaron Burr and John C Calhoun), as well as 101 members of the United States House of Representatives, 28 United States senators, six cabinet secretaries, three justices of the United States Supreme Court, 14 state governors and 13 state supreme court chief justices.Mark Boonshoft, "The Litchfield Network: Education, Social Capital, and the Rise and Fall of a Political Dynasty, 1784–1833." Journal of the Early Republic 34.4 (2014): 561–595. Online By the 1860s, academic law schools tied to universities were increasingly popular, as typified by the University of Pennsylvania, which opened its law department in 1850.Gary B. Nash, "The Philadelphia Bench and Bar, 1800–1861." Comparative Studies in Society and History 7.2 (1965): 203–220. ↵By the middle of the 19th century, there were over a hundred law schools in the country, most of them very small institutions run as a sideline operation.Anton-Hermann Chroust, Rise of the Legal Profession in America (1965), vol 2 pp 210, 220–21, quoting page 220.