Academic

Ernst on Recuiting New Deal Lawyers

By Lawrence Solum

Check out Dan Ernst's Jerome Frank Hires Some Lawyers, Part I, at Legal History Blog.  Here is a taste:

The young graduates of elite, case-method law schools who went to work in Franklin D. Roosevelt?s first two administrations, commonly known as ?New Deal lawyers,? were the first large cohort of ?Wall-Street-grade? legal talent to take entry-level jobs in the national government. In my teaching and scholarship I argue that these lawyers? quest for professional authority helped build bureaucratic autonomy in the federal government--that is, it helped strengthen officials? ability to act in ways that neither politicians nor organized interests preferred but were unable to check or reverse.

My students tend to think that prestigious institutions have always hired entry-level lawyers on the basis of academic merit. In lectures I explain how this standard emerged at corporate law firms in the early twentieth century and describe the very different hiring practices that prevailed in the federal government before the New Deal. What I needed was a reading that conveyed just how great a break the New Deal?s legal divisions represented.

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Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on June 17, 2008 (boomark / email).