The Rise of the New York Bar
The Legal Career of William Livingston
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4222701 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Milton M Klein (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1958 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 334 |
| Publication date | 1958-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1915621 |
| OpenAlex | W2325231315 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
O N the eve of the American Revolution, the legal profession in New York possessed both social prestige and political power. The terms lawyer and merchant, Crevecoeur noted in his Letters from an American Farmer, were the two fairest in colonial urban society. In New York, the Dominion of the Lawyers was a ceaseless complaint of one loyal servant of the King. Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden warned the English authorities that the New York bar, with their landlord allies and their friends in the Assembly, comprised a faction that was at once formidable and dangerous to good Government and a major threat to the Powers of the Crown.' During the earlier years of the eighteenth century, however, both bench and bar had been generally held in low repute. Merchants regarded lawyers jealously as potential rivals for political power; the rural population eyed them with suspicion as agents of the hated landlord class; and the great proprietors themselves were resentful of legal experts who could find flaws in long-accepted land titles and transform a peaceful countryside into a bedlam of litigation. Both merchants and landlords, accustomed to handling their own legal affairs or to entrusting them to lay colleagues, protested the professionalization of the law into a Mysterious Business; and they denounced it as a System of confounding other People and picking their Pockets.2
Bar (unit · Economic history · Geography · Law and economics · Meteorology · Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Economic and Legal Thought · History · Judicial and Constitutional Studies
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,07 |
| Citation span | 1959 - 2011 (53) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |