On this day in New York · August 21, 1878
The Lawyers Get Their Own Club, in Saratoga
Seventy-five lawyers skipped the racetrack and the mineral springs to sit in a town hall courtroom and invent the American Bar Association.
The facts
- Date
- August 21, 1878
- Location
- Town hall courtroom, Saratoga Springs, New York
- Founders
- 75 lawyers from 20 states and the District of Columbia
- First president
- James Overton Broadhead of Missouri
On August 21, 1878, seventy-five lawyers from twenty states and the District of Columbia gathered in the town hall courtroom in Saratoga Springs, New York, and founded the American Bar Association. At the time the legal profession barely resembled what it is today: most lawyers were sole practitioners trained through apprenticeship, there was no national code of ethics, and there was no organization where a lawyer in Missouri and a lawyer in Massachusetts could compare notes on the law. James Overton Broadhead, a Missouri lawyer who had spent the Civil War years organizing Union loyalists in St. Louis, was chosen as the new association's first president. Saratoga Springs, already a summer meeting ground for the well-off and the well-connected, gave the founders a convenient, neutral place to do it.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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the advancement of the science of jurisprudence, the promotion of the administration of justice and a uniformity of legislation throughout the country
The ABA's original 1878 constitution, stating the purpose of the new association
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
That one meeting in a courtroom upstate gave American lawyers their first national forum, and the association it produced still writes the model ethics rules most states build their bar exams and disciplinary codes around.
Sources
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