Product Description

How have the legal careers of twenty-five American presidents shaped their presidencies?

Of America's forty-three presidents, twenty-five have been lawyers.

America's most beloved and admired president, Abraham Lincoln, was involved in more than 5,100 cases during his 25-year legal career. John Adams, the first lawyer-president, combined a twenty-year law practice with significant contributions to our nation's founding charters. His son, John Quincy Adams, argued landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases both before and after his presidency. He was one of eight lawyer-presidents to appear as counsel before the highest court in the land. Rutherford Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and other lawyer-presidents gained fame handling sensational murder trials and equally high profile cases.

These are but a few of the fascinating stories about the legal careers of America's lawyer-presidents. Yet, these stories have largely been untold--until now. America's Lawyer-Presidents sheds light on the legal backgrounds of each of these chief executives and how their experiences as lawyers impacted and shaped their presidencies. Written by historians and presidential scholars and featuring an engaging and image-rich presentation, America's Lawyer-Presidents provides new insights into our national leaders and their lives and times, from colonial days to the present.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1025654 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Edited by the director of the American Bar Association's Museum of Law, this volume provides useful essays on each of America's 25 "lawyer presidents," among them Jefferson, both Adamses, Monroe, Lincoln, McKinley, Taft, Wilson, FDR, Nixon and Clinton. Contributors, including such scholars as Paul Finkelman, Lawrence Friedman and Lewis L. Gould, focus on how legal training prepared these men for their tenure as chief executive and influenced their conduct in office. These themes derive quite directly, as Gross writes, from Edmund Burke's view that "no other profession is more closely connected with actual life as the law. It concerns the highest of all temporal interests... property, reputation, the peace of all families, liberty, life even, and the very foundations of society." Of course, the law is quite a varied thing. While John Quincy Adams argued great cases involving human rights before the Supreme Court, Lincoln was primarily a business attorney specializing in railroads, while other presidents, like Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison, made their reputations prosecuting and defending headline-grabbing criminal cases. As this profusely illustrated volume demonstrates, each man was unique in what he brought to the law, what he took from the law and the extent to which he allowed his legal training to influence and inform executive policy.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
The legal profession has produced far more American presidents than any other occupation. This compendium of articles, emanating from the American Bar Association, chronicles the legal careers of presidents, assesses their legal ability, and appraises the influence of a legal cast of mind on their conduct of office. Each jargon-free profile starts with the future president's attraction to the law, some for its own sake as the civil medium of society, others as an entree to politics--"the high road to fame," as John Tyler described legal ambition. Bill Clinton and Franklin Roosevelt exemplify the latter; John Adams and Abraham Lincoln, the former; and the authors collectively perceive a correlation between avidity for the law and success at the bar. One who, as president, ranks near the bottom but was "probably the ablest lawyer ever to be president"--Benjamin Harrison--is equivalent in legal illustriousness to John Q. Adams or James Garfield, who argued constitutionally significant cases before the Supreme Court. This visually attractive volume will pique the abiding interest in presidents. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Twenty-five of the United States' forty-three Presidents have been lawyers, and yet their careers as attorneys have tended to receive scant attention when compared to their political lives, even though the training and activity of these men as lawyers often contributed deeply to their views on American institutions. America's Lawyer-Presidents, which is the work of an impressive assembly of respected scholars, is lucid, informative, and highly engaging. The book provides intriguing biographical perspectives on the professional lives of a number of our most influential citizens, and also demonstrates yet again the profound relationship between the development of American law and our democracy." -Scott Turow
-- Review