Jerold S. Auerbach

DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION DECADE, THE AMERICAN LEGAL
profession, structurally and ideologically committed to stability, underwent
wrenching change. Its texture was woven from various strands -- some
dating from the turn of the century, others quite new: the impact of
corporate capitalism on professional values and structure; the emergence of
university legal education as the primary channel of access to the profes-
sional elite; social stratification that produced blocked mobility and genera-
tional conflict; and the employment crisis created by the depression in
conjunction with the opportunity structure established by the Roosevelt
administration. Although lawyers are functionally committed to a process
of social ordering designed to mitigate abrupt or unpredictable change, the
nexus between law and public life requires their profession to serve as a
sensitive barometer of social change. Amid the turbulence of the thirties,
the legal profession, buffeted by external pressures and rent by internal
conflict, uneasily confronted both its past and its future.

During dedicatory exercises at the Law Quadrangle of the University of
Michigan in 1934, Justice Harlan F. Stone delivered an address decrying
the diminished public influence of the bar. Stone, nearing the end of his
first decade on the Supreme Court, could view his profession with uncom-
mon perspective. His experiences with the prestigious \Sullivan and
Cromwell firm, as dean of Columbia Law School, and as attorney general
in the Coolidge administration had exposed him to the major sources of
professional opportunity: private practice, legal education, and public

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