Academic

Lilley on Bar Addresses

By propertyprof

Now for something new, from a fellow laborer in the literary and bar address vineyard.  Stephen Lilley has recently posted his article, "The Hard Work of 'Hard Work': The Legal Elite's Rhetoric of Diligence and the Professionalization of the Law, 1850-1920," on ssrn.  Here is his abstract:

During the period from 1850 to 1920, the American legal profession underwent a dramatic process of professionalization. The emergence and proliferation of law schools and bar associations played a crucial role in this process, as an ethnically exclusive, male elite attempted to control the profession and limit the entrance of ethnic and racial minorities and women. 

This Article investigates elite lawyers' use of the rhetoric of hard work in speeches to law students and bar associations to strengthen emerging institutions in the American legal profession while protecting existing hierarchies. It analyzes the discouragement of solicitation through the definition of appropriate avenues for hard work and the use of the rhetoric of hard work to justify success and rationalize failure in the legal marketplace. It highlights elite lawyers' opportunistic use of the image of the self-made man to endorse law schools and bar associations, and to define the relationship between those institutions. The Article thus reveals a complicated series of unstated and fluid negotiations that contributed to the emergence of the modern American legal profession. It discusses resistance to the rhetoric of hard work, particularly among women attorneys who wished to be allowed to work as hard as their male counterparts, yet demonstrates the broad usefulness of this rhetoric to elite lawyers as they enhanced their position in the American legal profession.

Very creative use of sources (even though I'm obviously incredibly biased in this evaluation).   Nice combination of literary sources with echoes of Jerold Auerbach's Unequal Justice.  It reminds us just how much work is yet to be done on the history of the legal profession.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on March 09, 2009 (boomark / email).