How many lawyers are there, and how many presidents were lawyers? These are questions that have fascinated generations of Americans. In the United States, the American Bar Association claims to have the answers. It is not uncommon to hear some lawyer friends make remarks about how many presidents were lawyers and that these barristers were some of the brightest men in law.
Well, those days are over, folks: There is no question about it. The Bar Association now admits that there are no legal records of any of the twenty United States’ presidents. This admission may come as a great relief to many who have been studying public relations and thinking that some kind of documentation of the presidents was necessary for research into the fun facts of American Presidents.
The Bar Association has admitted that there were no such documents: and this comes as a great relief to genealogists and historians who had spent many years trying to discover more about the backgrounds of some of our nation’s greatest leaders. In Chapter 6 lawyers of the supreme court admit to having no original legal papers relating to the cases of many presidents. This chapter includes the first president of the United States, James K. Polk, and three of his Supreme Court appointees. It is amazing to think about the number of hours these men spent researching and trying to find something in these legal papers.
The twenty-three-page report is titled In the Grand Vacation: How Many Presidents Were Lawyers. What surprises most people is the fact that all the lawyers listed in this lengthy report were either district or circuit court lawyers. The only one who appears to be a maritime attorney on the list is Associate Justice John Marshall. Most of the other lawyers do not appear to be anything more than ordinary practitioners. While it is true that every president had an attorney with him at some point, none of them appears to have used a maritime attorney to represent him before the federal court. The reason for this is rather simple.
There are no fun facts about the profession of lawyers in the United States: but they can provide a rather interesting perspective into the lives of two of our greatest presidents. John Marshall, one of the chief Justices in the U.S. Supreme Court, was actually a very busy man. He also served as a United States marshal, and then as a clerk to Judge Samuel Seward in the federal court in Washington, D.C. It was while serving as a United States marshal that he took on the case of Aaron Wise, who was accused of hiding money from the government and later convicted of tax evasion.
Some interesting pieces of information: about American injury lawyers also show up in this collection. President Andrew Jackson signed the Compromise of 1832, which ended up being rejected by the Whig Party in the U.S. House of Representatives. Two years later, Aaron Burr was hanged for trying to save the union, even though some members of his party distrusted his ability to do so, and some people believed that the hangman’s bill should have been applied to him. There are many fun facts about American injury lawyers, some of them having to do with the way in which their work has changed over the years.
Nowadays, injury lawyers deal primarily with corporate law, trying cases that involve corporations or businesses.
