The American Bar Association Looks to England, 1924 and 1957

Abstract

Abstract This article’s overarching claim is that the leading elites of the American Bar consciously defined the legal profession in terms of its relationship to English law and practice during the first half of the twentieth century, although the manner in which they did so evolved over time. The two annual American Bar Association meetings in London in 1924 and 1957, hitherto passed over in the historiography, provide the main evidentiary basis for this contention. In detailing the profession’s conscious, anglophilic self-identification, this article makes five historiographical contributions: first, it underscores a genuine concern among American legal elites regarding procedural inefficiencies at the turn of the twentieth century and qualifies historiographical assumptions that the Association was largely ineffective before 1929. Second, it draws attention to a further preoccupation of the Bar, apparent at both meetings, concerning the rise of the administrative state and builds upon recent work in this area. Third, it highlights a transition in American legal thought vis-à-vis its common law heritage in the decades between the two wars, moving from a Burkean nostalgia in 1924 to a narrower appeal to Magna Carta as the ultimate bulwark against communism three decades later. Fourth, it underscores the growing role of lawyers as international peacemakers and the entanglement of law and politics, especially by 1957. Drawing together all of the aforementioned conclusions, this article’s fifth contribution is to underscore the extent to which legal elites were preoccupied with their status. In holding up the American legal profession to the standards of the English profession, leading American jurists were seeking the equivalent prestige enjoyed by their English brethren. Undoubtedly, this process was symbiotic, with their hosts happy to serve as exemplars at a time when British supremacy, especially in the light of the Suez Crisis, was quickly waning.