Law and Lawyers

Essay

From its earliest days as an English colony, Pennsylvania needed lawyers to run the government, settle disputes, and keep the peace. As Philadelphia became a large city and important commercial, insurance, banking, and shipping center on the eve of the American Revolution, its lawyers were crucial to every civic endeavor, including the making of a new nation. With the dawning of the Industrial Revolution and the birth of corporations, Philadelphia’s lawyers kept pace, growing from one-man practices to giant law firms. The law evolved as the country grew up and opportunities for Jews, women, and African Americans expanded in the legal profession and judiciary throughout the twentieth century.

When William Penn arrived in 1682 to govern as the proprietor of Pennsylvania, he brought with him a largely English system of government and law. This included counties, governing councils, courts, jails, judges, sheriffs, constables, and justices of the peace. The same legal system was brought to New York and New Jersey and the three lower counties of Penn’s grant that later became the state of Delaware.

Like so many other aspects of colonial life, Penn’s followers, the Society of Friends, or Quakers, put their own stamp on the early provincial Pennsylvania legal system as well as the governments and law of West and East Jersey. Although he had trained as a lawyer for a year in London, Penn and his Quaker brethren mistrusted lawyers and the unwritten and vague English common law, interpreted solely by judges, under which the Quakers were persecuted for their beliefs.

A black and white engraving of James Wilson
Philadelphia-based Attorney James Wilson signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He became the first associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1789. (Library of Congress)

Quakers believed in a gentler form of criminal justice. They preferred fines and public shaming to imprisonment and capital punishment, and they favored informal arbitration of civil matters among themselves and disdained lawyers. Nevertheless, English-trained lawyers came to Pennsylvania and made themselves useful to the new colony, becoming civic leaders and holding public office. In the earliest days, judges were likely to have little or no formal training and were chosen more for their character and stature in the community than their legal knowledge. Very few lawyers involved themselves in criminal matters, as it was the custom for the accused to represent themselves in court even in capital cases, trusting their fate to juries of their neighbors.

London for Legal Training

The earliest colonial lawyers specialized in civil practice stemming from land disputes, debt, and trade. They either trained at one of the four Inns of Court, prototype English law schools, in London before immigrating to America or went back there for training. Sending a son back to England for legal training was an expensive proposition, so in most cases students apprenticed to experienced local lawyers for periods of several years, commonly paying their mentors fees for the privilege. Students learned the law from sitting in court and watching proceedings and from copying legal documents. Both judges and lawyers “rode the circuit” to outlying counties that lacked their own courts to conduct hearings and trials.

As Anglican immigrants, as well as Germans, Dutch, Swedes, and other Europeans began to outnumber Quakers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, they gradually dropped out of civic affairs, finding that many aspects of governance clashed with their religious beliefs. Thus, English common law became the prevailing standard in the middle colonies. Lawyers largely depended on a handful of treatises on legal procedure, Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws,” and their knowledge of the English common law to conduct the legal business of the colonies. However, as the colonies developed their own legal systems, their legislatures undertook to codify the laws, and these new legal codes required trained lawyers and judges to apply and interpret them. The courts and bar associations gradually established standards for lawyers and restricted access to the courts to lawyers who met those standards. By the 1760s, lawyers were required to complete a four-year apprenticeship with “some gentleman of the law” before they were allowed to practice in the county courts and a year of such practice before they could appear before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Law books were scarce, and it was often a significant part of an apprentice’s work to copy those borrowed from other lawyers

By the Revolutionary War, Philadelphia had a thriving legal fraternity, and many of the colony’s lawyers played prominent roles both in resisting and in forging the new nation. Philadelphia’s conservative, upper-class attorneys largely supported the crown and opposed the movement toward independence, but some became revolutionaries. One, James Wilson (1742-98), a Scottish immigrant who settled in Philadelphia, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and served as one of the first associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

After the war, Philadelphia was the second-largest city in the new country and was a center of manufacturing, shipping, insurance, and finance. From 1790 to 1800 it was also the national capital. The national and state governments and all of the city’s courts were located on Statehouse Square at Chestnut Street between Fifth and Sixth Streets. Lawyers lived and worked in the same area and congregated daily in the surrounding streets. They were a small group, well known to one another, and many were members of Philadelphia’s oldest and wealthiest families. Judges and lawyers kept up the English custom of powdered wigs and formal black attire for some years after the war. Throughout much of the nineteenth century the city’s lawyers carried distinctive green cloth bags in which they transported their legal papers so that “green bag of technicalities” became a pejorative for lawyer.

Single Practitioners Dominated

A scanned page from the Legal Ingelligencer
The Legal Intelligencer is the oldest daily legal publication in the United States. It was founded in 1848 by Philadelphia lawyer Henry E. Wallace and remains in the city to this day. (Library of Congress)

A typical law office of the time was a two-story residence with the ground floor dedicated to offices and the second floor serving as family quarters. Most lawyers were single practitioners or formed firms when their sons or other relatives followed them into the profession, and partnerships were rare until the late nineteenth century. Around 1800, a partnership was usually two individuals: one man, the barrister, to appear in court and the other, the solicitor, to conduct business transactions. By the end of the century, one-man offices and two-man partnerships had evolved into hundreds of larger law firms. After the war, the law courts became distinctly defined as criminal, civil, and chancery, or business, courts. In Pennsylvania, lawyers did a good business litigating shipping and insurance issues stemming from the piracy of cargo ships in a separate maritime court. Each county had its own trial court called the Court of Common Pleas, while the Supreme Court and Superior Court became exclusively appellate institutions. Lawyers either settled in each county seat or migrated there from Philadelphia to practice law. In Delaware County, when the county seat moved from Chester City to Media in 1850, dozens of attorneys relocated to the new town as well.

The education of lawyers in the new nation continued as before, with lengthy apprenticeships, but students no longer went to the Inns of Court for training. American universities, such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, began to teach law courses as well. James Wilson launched a promising series of lectures in 1790 at the College of Philadelphia, later to become the University of Pennsylvania, but he lectured for less than one term before giving up his academic endeavors.

Another early development was that printers began publishing court decisions and legal codes, creating the need for lawyers to amass law libraries. In 1802, seventy-one attorneys formed the Law Library Company of Philadelphia to share access to law books. The law library was a stock company whose shares were valued at $20 and whose members paid annual dues of two dollars. In 1821, sixty-seven Philadelphia lawyers formed the first American bar association, the Law Association of Philadelphia, which merged with the law library in 1827. The bar association split from the law library in 1967 and the library became the Jenkins Law Library, still a major resource for Philadelphia-area lawyers.

Tarnished Reputation

In the Jacksonian era, the public generally looked down on the legal profession. Many lawyers had tarnished their reputations in the post-war years with land speculation and financial wheeler dealing. Some of Philadelphia’s attorneys got caught up in these practices, but the legal community persevered because the city’s thriving business and commercial activities needed well-trained lawyers.

The University of Pennsylvania established a law department in 1850 and thereafter, requirements for admission to the bar included university training. Philadelphia attorney Henry E. Wallace founded The Legal Intelligencer in 1843, making it the nation’s oldest continually published legal newspaper. It published legal news, opinions, legal notices, and insider gossip on the activities of lawyers and law firms. Even though Philadelphia Quakers were prominent leaders of the pre-Civil War abolition movement, the city’s lawyers, still largely upper class and conservative, were unsympathetic to the abolition cause. Nevertheless, a handful of Philadelphia lawyers became involved in the antislavery movement prior to the war, and many law students and attorneys fought on the Union side.

A painted portrait of John Graver Johnson
John Graver Johnson defended Standard Oil and the Sugar Trust, among others, during the antitrust trials of the 1890s. He also provided counsel during the antitrust trials of two local railway companies, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Baldwin Locomotive Company. (Library Company of Philadelphia)

Private John Graver Johnson (1841-1917) emerged from the war to become the most celebrated Philadelphia attorney of the nineteenth century. Even though he was a single practitioner and a product of the apprenticeship system, Johnson was considered the most skilled corporation lawyer in the United States of the century. He represented the Sugar Trust in the 1880s in one of the first antitrust cases after the adoption of Sherman Antitrust Act. Over the next 35 years, he represented countless banks and corporations, including U.S. Steel Corp., and argued numerous times before the U.S. Supreme Court. Johnson also amassed a valuable art collection that he left to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The city expanded geographically throughout the nineteenth century, and as its lawyers prospered they began to move their residences, along with the merchants, physicians, and captains of industry, to the Rittenhouse Square area around Nineteenth and Chestnut Streets. At the same time, immigrants poured into Pennsylvania and the legal profession began to open up slightly to Irish and Italian Catholics, Jews, Black people and women—the children of farmers, laborers, and small business owners.

The Move to City Hall

In 1901 Philadelphia City Hall was completed at Broad and Market Streets and the courts, the bar association, and the law library all moved out of the State House Square complex and into the massive new building. At the same time, elevators and cast iron construction materials allowed for the proliferation of tall office buildings, including the sixteen-story office Land Title Building, constructed at Broad and Chestnut Streets, across from city hall. Lawyers rented offices and established firms of various sizes in the new buildings. The invention of the typewriter and telephone revolutionized how law firms and businesses conducted their affairs.

A handful of Jewish lawyers practiced law in Philadelphia throughout the nineteenth century, from about 1800, but they were not welcome in the upper-class Protestant circles of the Philadelphia legal community or invited to join gentile law firms. Horace Stern (1878-1969) graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1899 and formed a partnership with Morris Wolf in 1903 to create one of the first all-Jewish Philadelphia law firms, Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen. Stern left the firm to take a seat on the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas in 1920 and became chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1952. Wolf, Block hired and nurtured countless Jewish lawyers, becoming one of the largest law firms in the United States before its dissolution in 2009.

Since African Americans had little economic or social power throughout the nineteenth and much of twentieth centuries, the city’s small number of Black lawyers were excluded from the white legal community and found work practicing criminal law and handling legal matters within their own community. In the first half of the twentieth century, Black lawyers educated in Philadelphia went to practice law in the minority communities in other counties of the state or were able to gain employment in community and government agencies. Many gravitated to legal work for churches, municipal legal departments, and organizations, such as the NAACP and the National Bar Association, formerly the Negro Bar Association, that advocated for fair housing and employment, school integration, criminal justice reform, and other issues that later coalesced into the Civil Rights movement. The Negro Bar Association was founded in 1925 after five African American lawyers were denied admission to the American Bar Association. By the 1940s it had established free legal clinics in most U.S. cities with more than 1,500 Black residents, including Philadelphia.

African American Lawyers Ascend

A black and white photograph of Sadie Mossell Alexander and Raymond Pace Alexander seated in their home
Sadie Mossell Alexander and husband Raymond Pace Alexander were two of the first African American lawyers in Philadelphia. Both were heavily involved in the civil rights movement, fighting for desegregation of schools and business. (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries)

Two African Americans, Henry Johnson and Isaac Parvis, were listed in the 1850 Philadelphia census as lawyers, but nothing else is recorded about them. Theophilus J. Minton was admitted to the bar in 1887. Aaron Mossell Jr. (1863-1951) was the first Black student to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, in 1888. His daughter, Sadie Mossell Alexander (1898-1989) was the first African American woman to graduate from Penn Law School, in 1927, after having already become the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in economics, also from Penn. She practiced law until 1982. Her husband, Raymond Pace Alexander (1898-1974), a graduate of Harvard Law School, formed the first Black law firm in Philadelphia and, in 1959, was elected the first Black judge of the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court. Both were very active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Women in particular had a very hard time being taken seriously by the legal profession. Caroline Burnham Kilgore (1838-1909), a medical doctor, fought for next ten years to gain admission to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, finally graduating in 1883. She was admitted to practice before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court two years later and before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1890. Even after women lawyers became more common, they often practiced law in their husbands’ firms or were relegated to probating wills and handling domestic relations cases, areas of law seen as suitable for women.

Several new legal specialties developed over the span of the twentieth century, including tax law, bankruptcy, personal injury, labor and employment, intellectual property, consumer fraud, and environmental law. When men and women were injured or killed on the job or in auto accidents, lawyers would seek to represent them or their families for a contingency fee, payable as a percentage of whatever recovery the client received. The legal establishment frowned on this “ambulance chasing,” but in 1928 the Philadelphia Bar Association concluded that the contingency-fee arrangement was necessary for the protection of injured persons who did not have the resources to pay attorneys up front.

Night School at Temple University

A black and white photograph of Horace Stern, Lewis Levinthal, and an unidentified man wearing tuxedos.
Judge Horace Stern (left) was one of the first men to open the law field to Jews. He founded one of the first all-Jewish law firms in the city and became the first Jewish justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. (Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries)

Admission to the bar required graduation from law school and passage of a rigorous bar examination. The apprenticeship path had disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century, but another pathway opened, night law school. Temple Law School opened in 1895 as an evening school, enrolling 46 students in its first class and graduating 16 of those students in 1901. Night school enabled working class Irish, Italians, Jews, Black people, and women to attend classes while they were also holding down day jobs. Lawyers educated at Penn looked down on Temple’s evening law school graduates as being less well educated and holding less prestigious degrees, and Temple was seen as being “the Jewish law school.” It was thus nearly impossible for Temple graduates to break into the large old-family firms.

The legal profession in Philadelphia, as in other cities, became a distinctly two-tiered system with the upper-class Protestant “governing class” lawyers operating quietly from plush offices to serve their political and corporate clients, while night school graduates became single practitioners or formed small partnerships, operating from storefront offices, representing the working class, minorities, and immigrants. Philadelphia’s first Legal Aid Society office opened in 1901 to serve the poor. By 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, it was averaging 15,000 cases a year. Starting around 1900 courts throughout the country also started to set up public defenders offices or adopted a system of appointing lawyers from private firms to represent indigent criminal suspects.

In 1908, the American Bar Association published the first Canon of Professional Ethics for practicing attorneys. One of those canons was a requirement that wealthy law firms provide a significant amount of work pro bono publico, or for the public good, representing poor clients, a requirement still in effect. In addition, area law schools also have provided pro bono programs to both serve the poor or specific causes and to provide practice for students.

After World War II, the G.I. Bill of Rights provided veterans with stipends and tuition to go to college, making college education available to millions. Penn and Temple law schools had no available space and had long waiting lists, but other area law schools, Rutgers University Law School in Camden, New Jersey, Villanova University Law School in Montgomery County, and Widener School of Law in Delaware helped take up the overflow.

The Civil Rights Movement

Many Black Philadelphia attorneys, long on the forefront of the fight for social justice, became involved in the 1960s civil rights movement. As counsel for the NAACP, Raymond Pace Alexander led legal battles to desegregate Pennsylvania schools as early as the 1930s. World War II Marine veteran Cecil B. Moore (1915-1979), a Temple graduate admitted to the bar in 1953, took the fight to integrate Girard College, a school established in the previous century for orphaned white boys, to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965 and won. Even as late as the 1960s, women and Black individuals still struggled for equality in the Philadelphia legal community. There were few (or no) Blacks or women on the bench, in big firms, or in executive positions in large corporations. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made minorities and women a protected group in education and employment, and by the 1970s, women accounted for nearly 50 percent of area law students, while Black male enrollment increased but remains low in proportion to Black representation in the general population. Also by the 1970s, the Philadelphia area’s major industries— locomotive- and shipbuilding, auto making, steel production, pharmaceuticals, and textile manufacturing— began to decline or relocate to other parts of the country, taking with them many legal jobs. When the Pennsylvania Railroad went bankrupt in 1970, it was the largest bankruptcy in American history and several hundred attorneys worked on its dissolution for years.

A sepia-tone portrait of William Rawle.
U.S. District Attorney William Rawle expanded the definition of “treason” during the Whiskey Rebellion trials in 1794. The law firm he founded in 1783, Rawle Law Offices (now Rawle & Henderson, LLP) is the oldest continually operating law office in the United States. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

In the last half of the twentieth century, many law firms grew to include hundreds of lawyers and multiple offices. Inevitably such growth included expansion to other cities and countries, either through mergers or the creation of branch offices. Tracing its origins back to 1875, Philadelphia’s Dechert, Price & Rhodes, as it came to be known in 1962, opened offices in London and Brussels, among other global cities, even as it established offices in Washington and New York before opening other offices in the region: in Harrisburg (1969) and Princeton (1987). Another venerable Philadelphia firm, Ballard Spahr, dating to 1885, opened its first branch office, in Washington, D.C., in 1978, later expanding services to New Jersey in 1999 and Delaware in 2002. Because most U.S. corporations incorporate in Delaware and the state’s chancery court has dictated corporate governance for companies throughout the country, Ballard was but one of dozens of large firms that located in Wilmington. One prominent Philadelphia firm, Pepper Hamilton, relocated to Berwyn in Philadelphia’s western suburbs. A few firms first established on the other side of the Delaware, in Camden, left their urban locations as well. These included both Archer and Greiner and Brown Connery, both founded in Camden in 1928. Well after they established their presence in the South Jersey suburbs in the 1970s, both firms opened offices in Philadelphia, affirming the continuing importance of a location central to the region. While some old established firms became less relevant and downsized, merged, or faded away, the nation’s oldest continuously functioning law office, Rawle & Henderson, founded in Philadelphia by William Rawle in 1783, was still flourishing in 2015 with offices in five states.

By the end of the twentieth century, technological innovations continued to change the practice of law and business in general. Copy machines, faxes, computers, email, and the Internet all revolutionized the practice of law, greatly improving the productivity of courts, law firms, and business. The legal documents once produced by quill pens in candle-lit front parlors 300 years ago are now filed and shared electronically with the stroke of a key.

Jodine Mayberry is a retired journalist. She was a legal writer and editor for West Publications, a division of Thomson Reuters, for 18 years. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Copyright 2015, Rutgers University

Gallery

James Wilson

Library of Congress

Lawyers practiced in Philadelphia from its colonial days, and by the eve of the American Revolution, the city’s legal profession was well-established. Though it had no law schools, Philadelphia still attracted a number of very reputable lawyers. The Scottish-born James Wilson was one such reputable lawyer. Wilson immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1766 after becoming interested in Enlightenment philosophy. He briefly lectured in law at the College of Philadelphia, later to become the University of Pennsylvania, and he helped found Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Wilson rose to prominence after publishing a scathing indictment of British colonial rule. In 1776, he became one of the signatories for the Declaration of Independence and was elected to the Continental Congress as a delegate for Pennsylvania. Wilson’s belief in the rule of law above all else, however, led to him defend wealthy Loyalists whose property was seized or destroyed by Patriots during the war. An angry mob surrounded Wilson’s home at Third and Walnut Streets on the night of October 4, 1779. Shots were fired both by the residents of the home, which came to be known as Fort Wilson, and by the mob; only the appearance of the militia dispersed the crowd. Wilson recovered politically from the attack. He helped draft the Constitution and was elected the first associate justice of the Supreme Court, a position he held from 1789 until his death in 1798.

William Rawle

Historical Society of Pennsylvania

William Rawle founded his law firm, Rawle Law Offices, in Philadelphia in 1783. Rawle was a delegate to the Constitutional Assembly in 1789, and in 1792 he was appointed the first U.S. district attorney by George Washington. During his appointment, Rawle prosecuted the rebels of the Whiskey Rebellion and expanded the legal definition of “treason,” which led to the first two American convictions for the crime. Through the nineteenth century, Rawle Law Offices continued to grow in both size and notoriety, and in 1822 Rawle was appointed as the first chancellor to the Philadelphia Bar Association, a position he held until his death in 1836. Rawle Law Offices continues to operate under the name Rawle & Henderson LLP. It is now recognized by the American Bar Association as the oldest continually operating law office in the United States.

The Legal Intelligencer

Library of Congress

Henry E. Wallace, a Philadelphia attorney, founded the Legal Intelligencer in 1843 with the goal of providing his fellow lawyers with the latest legal news. It began as a weekly publication operating out of an office at 117 Race Street. The business expanded throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and changed locations as it grew. In 1923, the paper moved to the Land Title Building at 1400 Chestnut Street, joining a number of legal offices in residence. In 1998, it was sold to American Lawyer Media, parent company of other legal publications such as American Lawyer magazine. The paper continues to be published in Philadelphia to this day, making it the oldest daily law publication in America.

John Graver Johnson

Library Company of Philadelphia

Until the mid-nineteenth century, men generally entered the law field through apprenticeship under an established lawyer. Apprenticeship was almost completely abandoned when dedicated law schools such as the University of Pennsylvania Law School opened, though some skilled attorneys, such as John Graver Johnson, continued to train through the apprenticeship system even after it lost its luster. Johnson studied in the law firm of Benjamin & Murray Rush and was admitted to the bar in 1863. He became one of the most respected and skilled corporate lawyers in America. After the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890, Johnson represented large corporate trusts in the U.S. Supreme Court, including the Sugar Trust and Standard Oil Company. He served as legal counsel in several other antitrust cases, including those of two local railroad companies, Pennsylvania Railroad and Baldwin Locomotive Company. Johnson declined U.S. Supreme Court nominations twice and was a favorite for the position of U.S. attorney general under President William McKinley, although ultimately the nomination was unsuccessful.

Johnson’s contributions to the city extended beyond his legal career. He was a lifelong collector of art, making annual trips to Europe to add to his collection, and he purchased the house next to his Broad Street residence to house his collection. Upon his death in 1917, he left his collection of over one thousand pieces spanning nearly the entire history of European art and the house they were stored in to the city. The house was far too small for display purposes, and when it opened as a museum in 1923, only about 275 of the works were on display. In 1933, the entire collection was moved to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it remains available to the public to this day.

Judges Horace Stern and Louis Levinthal

Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

Until the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s law profession was almost exclusively Protestant. Only a few scattered Jewish lawyers practiced during the nineteenth century. Horace Stern, shown here on the left, was one of the first men to truly open the profession to Jews. Stern was born in North Philadelphia to a large family and received a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1899. He continued on to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1902 and founded one of the first all-Jewish law firms in Philadelphia the next year with fellow attorney Morris Wolf. Stern’s law firm, Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen, continued to do business until 2009. Stern was also the first Jewish justice to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He remained active in Jewish civic affairs throughout his life.

Sadie Mossell Alexander and Raymond Pace Alexander, 1964

Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

As with many other fields, African Americans found it difficult to break into the law profession. There are scattered records of African American lawyers in late nineteenth century Philadelphia, but little is known about them. In 1888, Aaron Mossell Jr. became the first African American to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. His daughter, Sadie Mossell Alexander, pictured here with her husband, Raymond Pace Alexander, followed closely in her father’s footsteps. She became the first African American woman to graduate from the school in 1927, a feat she accomplished on the heels of becoming the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in economics. Sadie Alexander served as the first African American assistant to the city solicitor and was appointed to the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. She continued to practice law until retiring in 1982.

Sadie Alexander’s husband, Raymond Pace Alexander, was himself a revolutionary figure in Philadelphia’s law profession. Alexander attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business on a merit scholarship and was the school’s first African American graduate in 1920. In 1923 he became the first African American to earn a law degree from Harvard, and he founded the first African American legal firm in Philadelphia. From 1933 to 1935, Alexander served as the president of the National Bar Association, formerly the Negro Bar Association. He was elected as a member of the Philadelphia City Council in 1951. In 1959, he became the first African American judge appointed to Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas; he served there as senior judge from 1970 until his death in 1974. Alexander also worked tirelessly to desegregate Philadelphia’s schools and, along with his wife, was heavily involved in the civil rights movement throughout his life.

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Related Reading

Bartle III, Harvey. Mortals with Tremendous Responsibilities, a History of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2011.

Bell, Robert R. The Philadelphia Lawyer, a History, 1735-1945, Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1992.

Eastman, Frank M. Courts and Lawyers of Pennsylvania, a History, 1623-1923. New York: The American Historical Society Inc., 1922.

Mack, Kenneth W. Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Marietta, Jack D. and G.S. Rowe, G.S.,Troubled Experiment: Crime and Justice in Pennsylvania 1682-1800. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Rowe, G.S. Embattled Bench: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the Forging of a Democratic Society, 1684-1809. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1994.

Smith Jr., J. Clay. Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

St. John, Gerard J. “This Is Our Bar,” Philadelphia, Philadelphia Lawyer, Winter 2002, Vol. 64, No. 4.

Thomas III, George C., “Colonial Criminal Law and Procedure: the Royal Colony of New Jersey 1749-57,” New York, NYU Journal of Law & Liberty, Vol. 1, No. 2, pps. 671-711, 2005.

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