Professional Projects of Elite Chicago Lawyers, 1950–1974

Wiley and American Bar Foundation are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Bar Foundation Research Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

American Bar Foundation

Professional Projects of Elite Chicago Lawyers, 1950-1974 Author(s): Charles L. Cappell and Terence C. Halliday Source: American Bar Foundation Research Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 291-340Published by: on behalf of the Wiley American Bar FoundationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/828353Accessed: 29-07-2015 17:51 UTC

REFERENCESLinked references are available on JSTOR for this article:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/828353?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents

You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 131.156.157.31 on Wed, 29 Jul 2015 17:51:36 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Professional Projects of Elite Chicago Lawyers, 1950-1974

Charles L. Cappell and Terence C. Halliday

This article reports results of an inquiry into the composition and policies of the leaders of the Chicago Bar Association. The leadership cadre was partitioned into three status groups on the basis of background characteristics and law school attended. Outside educational elites, dominating the board during the early 1950s, pursued policies that defended prestigious areas of legal work from other encroaching professionals and sought to constrain the plaintiff side of the personal injury bar. Local ethnic elites obtained a share of the leadership during the mid-1960s and transformed the judicial politics of the CBA to conform to local Democratic party objectives. A t the center of the leadership cadre was a group of local aristocrats, well connected to major corporate and civic organizations, whose participation in the leadership roles fluctuated less dramatically than that of the other groups. A review of policies suggests that the local aristocrats were responsible to some extent for integrating the various specialized projects pursued by disparate segments of the Chicago bar. Detailed examination of the composition and policies of this local bar leads to the conclusion that associations of the legal profession are capable of accommodating diverse interests to an extent not previously measured or assessed.

INTRODUCTION

Legal elites, it has been argued, either have too much power, which they use to their own or their clients' advantage, or they have too little power, which prevents them from effectively organizing a diverse occupation into a

Charles L. Cappell, the senior author, is Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, and Affiliated Scholar, American Bar Foundation. A.B. 1968, MacMurray College; M.A. 1974, University of Illinois, Chicago; Ph.D. 1982, University of Chicago.

Terence C. Halliday is Research Social Scientist, American Bar Foundation, and Lecturer, the College, University of Chicago, 1983-84. M.A. 1972, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand; M.A. 1973, University of Toronto; Ph.D. 1979, University of Chicago.

Funding for this study has been provided by the American Bar Endowment, the Russell Sage Founda- tion, the National Science Foundation, and the Chicago Bar Foundation. Halliday also acknowledges the generous support of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Australian National University. The authors ex- press their appreciation to John Heinz and Edward Laumann, codirectors of the ABF's Studies of the Organized Bar: Chicago Bar Association, for their support over a number of years. They are greatly in- debted to the Chicago Bar Association, its Development of Law Committee, and Executive Director John McBride, for the generous access they provided to the documentary sources on which this study is based. The opinions and conclusions presented in this paper are those of the authors.

An earlier and truncated version of this paper entitled "An Approach to the Study of Elite Recruitment

? 1983 American Bar Foundation 291


292 AMERICAN BAR FOUNDATION RESEARCH JOURNAL 1983:291

significant lobbying force. Our paper describes a local test of the major debates regarding the degree of autonomy, influence, and integration of the legal profession. We will argue that the Chicago Bar Association (CBA) has pursued diverse objectives and that the increased participation of a group of lawyers who until fairly recently had only minimal access to positions of professional governance, a group we have identified as local ethnic lawyers, was the primary source of the increased diversity.

In our first article on the leadership of the CBA, we concluded that the composition of the leadership was more representative than most earlier studies of the legal profession had led us to expect.' We began to examine whether there was any pattern to the changes over time in the composition of the Board of Managers and whether professional policies were related to the changing composition. In this article, we move beyond our earlier discussions of the representativeness and degree of democracy within the CBA by examining not only background characteristics of 219 attorneys who were members of the Board of Managers in the 25-year period 1950 through 1974 but also many of the CBA'S policies during that period. Our analysis of the data in light of those further questions has revealed a link between changes in the leadership and the policies pursued by the CBA.

Quantitative analysis of these data uncovers three distinct status classes into which the CBA leadership was divided. Each of the three status classes of elite lawyers we identify had its own political agenda, and each status class at various times exercised substantial control over the CBA'S official policies. We also describe how the changes that have occurred within the leadership cadre in the recent past can be interpreted in terms of internal professional politics and in terms of changes in the external political, social, and economic environments in which the CBA operates. Our findings call for an elaboration of the current accepted generalization that the organization and policies of legal elites are dominated by a single homogeneous status class.

I. THE ROLE OF BAR ASSOCIATIONS

A. Introduction

The few detailed studies of bar associations to appear in the literature have shared the conclusion that these professional associations are important and powerful organizations. Their lobbying activities in Congress have been described as unique because rather than maintaining a narrow focus

and Circulation" was read to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, 1980. The authors acknowledge and appreciate the research assistance of Cathy Wildman, Catie Strong, Michael Powell, Robert Rosenberg, and Katherine Rosich. Earlier drafts benefited from critical readings by Spencer Kimball, Joe Galaskiewicz, John Higley, Frank Jones, Thomas Davies, and an anonymous reviewer.

1. Terence C. Halliday & Charles L. Cappell, Indicators of Democracy in Professional Associations: Elite Recruitment, Turnover, and Decision Making in a Metropolitan Bar Association, 1979 A.B.F. Res. J. 697.


No. 2 PROFESSIONAL PROJECTS OF ELITE LAWYERS 293

on legislative issues involving lawyers and the practice of law, bar associations have directed their efforts across a broad range of issues.2

Bar associations emerged at a specific point in American history, partly in response to the growing heterogeneity of the profession and partly to advance the status of the profession. Researchers who have studied the past and present activities of bar associations have identified several functions those organizations have performed, among the most important of which are those addressed in this study. Bar associations have attempted to establish and maintain a status and prestige for the profession as a whole as well as for individual practitioners. They have monitored the operation of the legal system, especially the judiciary.3 They have administered and disciplined the practice of law. Important as well, they have used their resources to regulate legal work and to protect it from outside competition.4

The term professional project has been coined to represent the means by which the elite of an occupation integrate diverse objectives, such as those named above, into a coherent program that, if successfully carried out, ob- tains for the occupation the necessary autonomy and market control characteristic of a profession.'

As with any collective merging of individual wills and interests, the definition and the development of a professional project are difficult tasks. It has been recognized for some time that many professions are amalgams of specialized work groups or segments and that often these segments compete for the resources necessary to realize different and possibly mutually exclusive occupational objectives.' The histories of bar associations contain many ex- amples of such struggles emanating from a segmented and stratified occupation.' Furthermore, some objectives of the professional project of lawyers may not be compatible with other objectives. For example, a secure position in the marketplace requires strong ties with a consistent clientele. In practice, fiduciary relationships between lawyers and clients are partisan and rest upon a foundation of trust and loyalty. This strong tie threatens to undermine the claim of neutrality and, therefore, autonomy, another objective.

2. Corinne Lathrop Gilb, Hidden Hierarchies: The Professions and Government at ch. 4 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

3. For an indication of bar association involvement in programs for judicial change between 1970 and 1980, see the results of a national survey of bar associations reported in Terence C. Halliday, Lawyers, Legislatures, and Legal Rationalization in the United States, 1970-80, a paper read to the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, 1983.

4. For current empirical evaluations of the extent to which state and major metropolitan associations engage in enforcement of professional ethics and the control of unauthorized practice, see the results of two national surveys: Deborah L. Rhode, Policing the Professional Monopoly: A Constitutional and Em- pirical Analysis of Unauthorized Practice Prohibitions, 34 Stan. L. Rev. 1 (1981); and Terence C. Halli- day, Professions and the Limits of the Monopoly Motif, paper read to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, September, 1983.

5. Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis ch. 2, 49-52 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

6. Rue Bucher & Anselm Strauss, Professions in Process, 66 Am. J. Soc. 325 (1961). 7. Jerold S. Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1976).



Heterogeneity of practitioners, the segmentation of substantive specialties, and persistence of status differences between lawyers have been identified in practically all studies of the profession as major factors inhibiting the profession from speaking with a single voice on most issues. Larson, who compared the development of the legal profession to that of other professions, reached the extreme conclusion that to a large extent the professional project of lawyers has failed:

In conclusion, we may say that the two largest and oldest professions, medicine and the law, show two different resolutions of the internal stratification problem and two different modes of insertion into the class system. In each case, structure and function determined strategy: medicine found a principle for reconciling its internal cleavages because it was capable of spreading substantial economic benefits across its fragmented and stratified market. In re- turn, the interests of the small medical "entrepreneurs" have to be respected, at least apparently, by the profession's elites. The law, lacking effective means for claiming the global solidarity of its membership, segregated from each other its most different areas of practice."

Larson identified the heterogeneity of the bar as the major impediment to developing "global solidarity" among lawyers. The core of her discussion of the issue may be seen in her two major reasons why the elite of the bar have not been able to unify their occupation to the extent seen in medicine. She referred not directly to the unwillingness of legal elites to establish this condition but rather to the aspects of legal work that intrinsically militate against integration--aspects that, according to Larson, are absent or diminished in the work of other more successful professionals, particularly physi- cians. Much of the work of lawyers--advocacy, advice, and negotiation- transfers to the lawyering role a content derived from the status and class positions of the client more than is so for other professions. Often different clients pursue conflicting interests, making agreement or solidarity on the basis of substantive policies very unlikely. Larson did not overlook the degree of consensus that is possible and often realized regarding the formal and procedural aspects of legal practice, such as belief in the adversary system and the "rule of law." She argued, however, that legalism as a unifying ideology is weak and transient compared to science, the governing ideology of medicine.9 The resolution of legal problems is ultimately dependent on the authority of the state and the judgments of the courts, institutions not directly controlled by the collective will of legal practitioners. It was because of these structural features that Larson surmised that the professional project of lawyers has been unsuccessful. Governing elites have not been able to overcome the heterogeneity of interests within the occupation enough to establish an autonomous and unified profession.

Larson's generalizations about the segmentation of the bar, as well as a recent study of legal practice in Chicago that supports her descriptions, were

8. Larson, supra note 5, at 177. 9. For a discussion of legalism as the ideology of the American bar, see Judith N. Shklar, Legalism

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).



based on the distribution of labor in the marketplace for legal services, which remains highly segmented and stratified.10 Yet the assessment of the success of the lawyers' professional project should be based on an analysis of the major organizations within the profession, not on statistical aggrega- tions of lawyers. Larson referred to bar associations as well as to law firms and to the organization of law schools (the Association of American Law Schools) as possible locations for the administration of the lawyers' professional project. Law firms are embedded in the marketplace for legal services, which makes them unlikely sources for programs that will integrate the bar or pursue the collective interests of all lawyers. Law schools, embedded as they are in the stratification system, account for a major share of the status differentials that separate large segments of the practicing bar. Larson recognized the importance of standardized education in the development of a profession and argued that legal education in general and law schools in particular have not been successful in overcoming the segmentation produced by the marketplace:

The apparent success of standardization does not make the profession any less fragmented: legal specialties are closely related to the status of a lawyer's clientele; both specialization and stratification appear to be associated with the prestige of a lawyer's school. These segments are separate and often im- penetrable to each other."

Larson's explicit references to bar associations were limited to the forma- tive era when they were directed by elite business lawyers and a few prominent law teachers. This slight attention paid to bar associations belies their importance for explaining the degree of success lawyers have had in establishing the status and authority associated with the profession. Bar associations, among all of the organizations within the legal profession, have the most potential for integrating the diverse members of the bar-for housing a collective professional project. Yet there has been very little detailed up- to-date research of bar associations and their policies. Larson's failure to make detailed observations on the composition of bar association leadership forced her to rely for her characterization of the profession entirely on studies that reported the segmentation within the legal marketplace.

This state of affairs suggests to us that the question about the success or failure of the lawyer's professional project may have been closed prema- turely. In our detailed research on the composition of the CBA leadership, we found substantial participation by lawyers from diverse status groups. The Chicago Bar Association has developed several distinct, at times competing, policies that can be viewed as components of a "local professional

10. Edward O. Laumann & John P. Heinz, Specialization and Prestige in the Legal Profession: The Structure of Deference, 1977 A.B.F. Res. J. 155; John P. Heinz & Edward O. Laumann, The Legal Pro- fession: Client Interests, Professional Roles, and Social Hierarchies, 76 Mich. L. Rev. 1111 (1978); Ed- ward O. Laumann & John P. Heinz, The Organization of Lawyers' Work: Size, Intensity, and Co- practice of the Fields of Law, 1979 A.B.F. Res. J. 217.

11. Larson, supra note 5, at 175.



project." As we will show, the composition of the Board of Managers was correlated to some extent with development of these local policies. Aspects of Larson's concept of a professional project were validated by our inquiry, but we assess the development of a successful project not only by the degree of homogenization of interests and not only by the domination of association policy by a single group of elites. Our inquiry highlights the competition, accommodation, and compromise between elites that resulted in successfully developing and integrating more local, circumscribed projects.

B. The Governing of Bar Associations Given the importance of bar associations as the most likely organizational

sites for coordinating local professional projects, it is surprising that so little serious research has focused on these collectivities. The commentary on bar associations that has appeared in the literature has concluded that a select segment of the bar has been responsible for the creation and governance of bar associations, especially the largest and most influential associations. These commentaries have claimed that leaders of the organized bar associations were disproportionately corporate and commercial lawyers who worked in the largest law firms. Much of this common wisdom has been based on relatively sparse information; only two major systematic studies of bar associations, their leaders, and their policies have been carried out. These two studies, one by Auerbach, the other by Melone, differed in many respects but reached similar conclusions. According to both studies, the leaders of the organized bar formed a homogeneous group recruited from the apex of the stratification pyramid that characterizes the private practice of law. The policies pursued by those leaders were said to reflect coherently the interests of the typical clients of those elite lawyers. In order to frame our own study, we first will review these earlier efforts.

1. Auerbach's Elite Theory Auerbach has written an interpretive history covering the policies the or-

ganized bar has pursued over the past one hundred years.'2 While he was primarily concerned with demonstrating the bar's failure to provide equal legal services to the lower classes throughout the period, he has also provided a description of the elite of the organized bar. By using quotations from prestigious lawyers as well as citing the policies of the organized bars, Auer- bach argued that the traditional elite of the bar have fought any changes that might have the effect of diminishing the legal advantages and preroga- tives of their wealthy clients. Established elites have either successfully defended their policies from attacks by new elites or co-opted the new elites. Competition between elites existed to some extent, but challenges to the authority of the established elite were unsuccessful. This victory by the established elites diminished the profession's claim of legitimate legal authority. To use Larson's framework, the professional project of lawyers failed to

12. Auerbach, supra note 7.



establish the necessary autonomy because elite lawyers were unwilling to abandon the interests of their usual clientele and because they prevented new elites from commanding the resources of the organized bar to advance different and competing interests.

Two major motifs directed Auerbach's interpretive history of the modern legal profession and its policies: (1) the tension between the individual lawyer's partisan loyalty to his client and the profession's writ-large commitment to universal access to legal services and (2) the tension between democracy and stratification within the bar."3 Auerbach used ethnicity and status- class characteristics of lawyers in his explanation of the profession's struggle with this second tension: He outlined a recurring pattern in which the dominant elite (successful corporate and business lawyers) were challenged by emerging and peripheral elites (such as successful New Deal lawyers in the 1930s) but did not surrender their control over the policies and institutions required to preserve their hegemony within the profession and their client's hegemony within the legal system. Also, in his interpretive history, the minority ethnic status of many of the emerging elite lawyers has delayed their acceptance into the inner circles of professional governance.

Auerbach described a dynamic history of professional governance. The emergence of new elites was tied to new developments in the legal system. The development of administrative and labor law, results of New Deal legislation, and later the development of civil rights law-all created new opportunities, in terms of an increase in the number of positions for lawyers and in terms of the agencies, organizations, and institutions the occupants of those positions came to control. Entrenched elites were forced to grant status to the recognized experts in those fields, but only a few of the new elites achieved leadership status in the organized bar. Because ethnic segmentation continued to be correlated with specialization, this infusion produced only minimal changes in the status-class characteristics of the governing elite. The resistance of the traditional, entrenched, aristocratic lawyers to the dramatic increase of immigrants practicing law in the first quarter of this century was repeated to some extent in the latter half, especially during the Cold War years.

What have been the major consequences of the emergence of new, socially differentiated elites within the profession? Auerbach concluded:

Changing elites did not change professional values. The growth of a parallel elite did assure a necessary degree of social mobility within the legal profession. The ultimate assimilation of the new elite into the traditional structure strengthened professional values which might have been jeopardized by exclusion based solely upon social and ethnic factors. At the base of the professional pyramid little had changed. The battleground was at the apex, where old and new elites clashed. When the dust kicked up by their professional rivalry finally settled, the old structure was greatly strengthened by its newest inhabi- tants, who were, by their presence, its newest defenders."'

13. Id. at ch. 4. 14. Id. at 229.



Auerbach has implied that "parallel elites" were recruited to positions within the dominant and traditional structures of professional governance (read bar associations) but only after the recruits had demonstrated their commitment to the policies supported by the old elite. In short, new elites were co-opted.

But there is a problem with Auerbach's analysis: he made repeated references to the professional elite but never drew the boundaries of that elite. His definition of the elite expanded or contracted at different points in his analysis. At times his discussion of the profession's policies singled out for criticism one or two elites and their preferences. This gave the impression of the persistent hegemony of a central and homogeneous elite. In our study, by carefully delineating the boundaries of the legal elite, we are able to provide a systematic test of whether his generalizations regarding the composition and policies of the legal elite apply to Chicago, or whether Chicago represents a local exception to his general rule.

2. Melone's Description of the ABA Elite

Individual and practice characteristcs were used in a study by Melone to compare the composition of the leadership cadre of the ABA-defined as all members of the House of Delegates, the Board of Governors, the ABA Coun- sel, the Assistant Secretary, and the Assistant Treasurer-to the United States bar as a whole.' His study focused on one year, 1966, during which he found that firm lawyers were well over twice as likely to be found among the leaders as among the bar at large, that graduates from the elite law schools were slightly more than twice as likely to be found among the leaders, that lawyers from the Northeast were somewhat underrepresented among the leaders, and that the leaders were much older than the median age for lawyers.'6 To further substantiate his claim that the leadership cadre represented the elite sector of the bar, Melone reported: "fifty-three percent of the 1966 ABA leadership cadre possess for clients, or are members of firms who claim as clients, many of the top-ranked industrial, merchandising, banking, insurance, transportation and utilities enterprises in the United States."" He used this evidence to frame the hypothesis that ABA leaders would be disposed to act in the interests of large, powerful business clients. To explicitly test the hypothesis, he compared the lobbying activities of the ABA to other lobbying groups over a 16-year period, 1953-68. After reviewing the posture of the ABA in the context of the positions taken by various other groups, Melone concluded: "ABA policies may not be consistent with the interests of all lawyers, but ABA policies are consistent with the interests of ABA leaders and their clients."'" On the basis of his study, Melone trenchantly characterized the ABA elite as "agents of the moneyed class.""

15. Albert P. Melone, Lawyers, Public Policy and Interest Group Politics (Washington, D.C.: Univer- sity Press of America, 1977).

16. Id. at chs. 2, 3. 17. Id. at 79-80. 18. Id. at 211. 19. Id. at 201.



While his more circumscribed study avoided some of the problems we noted in Auerbach's history, Melone's conclusions at times overstated his evidence. For example, the different rates of leadership attainment for lawyers did indicate unequal access, but diversity within the leadership cadre of the ABA was also indicated. Such diversity reflected the institutional character of the ABA, a federated structure in which relatively small bar associations are given seats in the House of Delegates. Melone studied the ABA cadre of leaders for only one year; we need to know if that year's elite was typical or anomalous. His evidence that the lobbying activities of the ABA during the period 1953-68 paralleled the activities of many business policy groups was more convincing, but he again underemphasized the evidence that the ABA, on certain issues such as law enforcement, agreed with liberal lobbying groups, a fact perhaps pointing to a degree of diversity among the leadership. Most important, we need to understand the sources of the diversity of policy preferences as well as the coherent probusiness posture of the ABA elite. If policy preferences were determined primarily by the agency relationships with typical clients, were diverse policies a result of changes in the cadre of leaders?

Our study of the leadership composition and some of the policies pursued by the CBA is able to provide a more precise picture of the structure and strategy of professional governance. We have a clearly identified positional elite, members of the Board of Managers of the CBA. We have coded information on the elite over a 25-year period. We have used CBA documents, both public and private, to determine whether the changes in elite composition have been translated into different policies pursued by the professional association.

II. A LOCAL TEST OF ELITE THEORY: IDENTIFYING STATUS CLASSES WITHIN THE CHICAGO BAR ASSOCIATION'S BOARD OF MANAGERS, 1950-74

The Chicago Bar Association now has more than 16,000 voluntary members. Yet each year before 1970, the activities of this massive association were governed by 21 lawyers who were nominated for office in closed meetings and who ran for office unopposed. (After 1970, the number of board members was increased to 22.) From 1950 to 1974, 219 different persons served on the Board of Managers of the CBA. The Board of Managers made all the administrative decisions within the CBA. Recommendations from any of the substantive law committees had first to be approved by a majority of the board before any public pronouncements could be made or before any political action could be initiated in the name of the Chicago Bar Associa- tion.

For each of the board members we coded biographical information from a variety of sources: from character and fitness reports that all lawyers are required to fill out when they apply for admission to the state bar, from membership records maintained by the CBA, and from the Martindale-Hub- bell Law Directory and other public sources containing information on a



lawyer's practice.20 These data included information on each lawyer's fami- ly background, undergraduate and legal education, committee involvements within the CBA, and participation in a wide range of other organizations.

In our first report, we compared the distributions of many of these variables obtained from the CBA elite to those obtained from cohorts constructed from a survey of 777 attorneys in Chicago.21 We reported in our summary that the leadership of the CBA during the period 1950-74 seemed to have been dominated by third-generation Americans, firm lawyers, and lawyers 42 to 58 years of age. But this elite was not completely homogeneous. Graduates from every law school in Chicago were found on the board, as were a variety of legal specialists. Thus, we did not find the degree of homogeneity among the elite expected on the basis of elite theory.

A. Status Classes Within the CBA Elite

The quantitative analysis of elite lawyers' background characteristics we present in this section will show that the composition of the Board of Man- agers can be understood in terms of three underlying status classes. The findings reported here can be used to elaborate upon Auerbach's description of the legal elite. Recall Auerbach's argument that at the outset of the twentieth century and again at midcentury the traditional elite of the legal profession actively opposed emerging legal elites who were gaining control of new sources of legal expertise and authority. In Auerbach's account these new elites, with social class backgrounds different from the older elites, were not able to influence professional policies, partly because they did not develop the collective strength to change the policies, partly because the new elites were co-opted, and partly because the new elites established parallel associations. Auerbach's history has made status class a useful concept for understanding the composition and transformation of the profession and its governing elites; many of the issues and sources of conflict within the bar during the modern period have been aligned along status and class dimensions.22 Melone too found evidence of a consistent alignment of ABA legislative policies with large business concerns on most economic issues.23

Results reported elsewhere have substantiated the advantages that existed for lawyers with higher social and educational status in obtaining the powerful organizational positions within the CBA.24 We do not dispute those find-

20. The original data sets, comprising the biographies of CBA leaders, the collation of documentary materials on legislative issues (committee reports, correspondence, and transcripts), and the coding of 200 leadership debates on legislation, were collected and supervised by Terence Halliday in the early stages of the Chicago Bar Project. Additional data on clients of CBA leaders and a further coding of the legislative issues was directed by Charles Cappell. We also relied on data collected from a random survey of 777 Chicago attorneys, John P. Heinz & Edward O. Laumann, Chicago Lawyers: The Social Structure of the Bar (New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1982).

21. Halliday & Cappell, supra note 1. 22. Auerbach, supra note 7, at ch. 4. 23. Melone, supra note 15, at ch. 4. 24. Charles L. Cappell, Professional Projects and the Private Production of Law ch. 2 (Ph.D. Diss.,

University of Chicago, 1982).



ings here. But those advantages do not mean that access to leadership positions was closed to other lawyers. As we will see, when the CBA expanded its membership, at least one of the segments of the bar that Auerbach placed at the fringes of professional government substantially increased its representation within the CBA leadership cadre.

Because practically all research on the legal profession has emphasized the significance of class and ethnic distinctions as well as the nature of the lawyer's legal education in generating the internal divisions within the practicing bar, we included in our analysis indicators of background social status: whether parents were native born, board member's place of birth, father's occupation, and what law school the board member attended. For national origin a member was coded (1) if both parents were native born, (2) if at least one parent was foreign born. Member's place of birth was coded (1) if a member was born in Chicago metropolitan area, (2) if born elsewhere. Occupational status of a member's father was coded (1) if father worked at a professional, managerial, or administrative level, (2) if he worked in a lower-status occupation.2 Last, the law school the member attended was coded (1) for the University of Chicago; (2) for Northwestern University; (3) for De Paul University, Loyola University (Chicago), IIT/Chicago Kent, or John Marshall (DLKM);26 (4) for Harvard University, Yale, or Columbia University (eastern elite); or (5) for other, usually large midwestern law schools. The observed joint frequencies of these four variables are presented in table 1.

On the basis of these data, we can begin to assess the degree of homogeneity among the board members. First, we note that the board members were most homogeneous with respect to the social attribute of having both parents born in the United States, 71% sharing this characteristic. Two- thirds received their legal education in the Chicago area, 30% at the DLKM law schools; 56% shared a common occupational heritage, their fathers being professionals or managers; and 52% were born in the Chicago area.

1. Latent Structure Analysis of Background Characteristics

We need a description of the board members that moves beyond a consideration of one background characteristic at a time. We would like to be able to describe the board members in terms of their similarities on the attributes considered jointly as presented in table 1. Taking the profiles of individual board members described above as the basic data, we used a statistical technique, latent structure analysis, to create a theoretical typology of board members. Since this technique has been fully described in the statisti-

25. By exact breakdown the upper-status group included 34 of the board with lawyer fathers, 25 with fathers who worked in the other professions or in technical fields, 33 with fathers who were managers or executives.

26. The four schools were combined in one category rather than two categories that distinguished the two Catholic schools from the two non-Catholic ones for the following reasons: the small sample size limits the number of cells we can include in the table; in a separate analysis that made such a distinction, background effects on attendance at DePaul-Loyola versus Kent-Marshall were small.



cal literature, only a summary discussion is provided here.27 A latent class model is a hypothesis that the observed relationships among several observed (manifest) variables-such as place of birth and law school attended-can be accounted for by the distribution of respondents along an unob- served (latent) variable-such as the status class of the respondents. The categories of this statistically derived latent variable are exhaustive and mu-

TABLE 1 Latent Structure Analysis of CBA Leadership Based on Background Variables

Parents' Place Father's Modal National of Occupa- Law Observed Expected Assign Prob- Origin Birth tion School Frequency Frequency to Class ability U.S. Chi. Prof. Chi. 6 5.57 2 .7882 U.S. Chi. Prof. Nw. 8 10.13 2 .9490 U.S. Chi. Prof. DLKM 13 10.89 2 .8503 U.S. Chi. Prof. E.elite 9 8.75 2 .9068 U.S. Chi. Prof. Other 4 4.31 2 .7385 U.S. Chi. Other Chi. 2 3.65 1 .7528 U.S. Chi. Other Nw. 1 1.97 1 .7602 U.S. Chi. Other DLKM 8 6.14 1 .8731 U.S. Chi. Other E.elite 2 1.40 3 .8678 U.S. Chi. Other Other 2 2.02 3 .7598 U.S. Other Prof. Chi. 5 5.53 2 .4886 U.S. Other Prof. Nw. 10 6.84 2 .8655 U.S. Other Prof. DLKM 5 7.93 2 .7197 U.S. Other Prof. E.elite 8 8.91 2 .5491 U.S. Other Prof. Other 7 7.06 3 .7185 U.S. Other Other Chi. 5 4.80 3 .8210 U.S. Other Other Nw. 2 1.79 3 .6811 U.S. Other Other DLKM 5 4.46 3 .6218 U.S. Other Other E.elite 7 6.10 3 .9813 U.S. Other Other Other 7 7.73 3 .9787 Frgn Chi. Prof. Chi. 2 1.95 1 .6841 Frgn Chi. Prof. Nw. 2 1.88 2 .5972 Frgn Chi. Prof. DLKM 3 3.76 1 .6925 Frgn Chi. Prof. E.elite 1 1.08 2 .8561 Frgn Chi. Prof. Other 1 0.77 2 .4839 Frgn Chi. Other Chi. 6 5.87 1 .9719 Frgn Chi. Other Nw. 5 3.18 1 .9768 Frgn Chi. Other DLKM 10 11.27 1 .9882 Frgn Chi. Other E.elite 0 0.25 3 .9148 Frgn Chi. Other Other 1 1.16 1 .7384 Frgn Other Prof. Chi. 1 1.21 3 .4187 Frgn Other Prof. Nw. 0 1.06 2 .6536 Frgn Other Prof. DLKM 3 1.78 1 .4241 Frgn Other Prof. E.elite 2 1.34 3 .5733 Frgn Other Prof. Other 2 1.26 3 .7718 Frgn Other Other Chi. 4 2.41 1 .6845 Frgn Other Other Nw. 0 1.15 1 .7827 Frgn Other Other DLKM 3 3.77 1 .8552 Frgn Other Other E.elite 0 1.16 3 .9885 Frgn Other Other Other 2 1.70 3 .8514

NOTES: Complete information on all background characteristics was obtained for 164 of the 219 board members. G2= 17.126 with 16 degrees of freedom for three-class latent model. Of the cases 80.56%7o would be correctly allocated to their status class.

27. Leo A. Goodman, The Analysis of Systems of Qualitative Variables When Some of the Variables Are Unobservable. Part I-A Modified Latent Structure Approach, 79 Am. J. Soc. 1179. (1974); id., Ex- ploratory Latent Structure Analysis Using Both Identifiable and Unidentifiable Models, 61 Biometrika 215 (1974).



tually exclusive. The actual analysis begins with a series of hypotheses regarding the number of classes needed by the latent variable to adequately account for the associations among the manifest variables. When a hypothesized model fits the observed data well enough, if the latent variable could be introduced as a control variable, all the associations among the manifest variables would disappear. In other words, the latent variable "captures" the observed associations among the manifest variables.

As a last step in the analysis we will describe how we were able to assign board members to one of the latent classes hypothesized to account for the associations among the background characteristics. Board members in each group shared a set of attributes that statistically cohere and that represent a pattern of life experiences, such as the increased likelihood that locally born attorneys with nonprofessional fathers will have attended DLKM law schools. Once we created distinct status classes within the elite, we were able to conduct local tests of Larson's and Auerbach's conjectures about the internal politics of the organized bar. We were able to determine at what times the different status classes of Chicago lawyers have governed the CBA and whether the policies of the CBA reflected the status-class structure of the Board of Managers.

One might expect that the existence of two latent classes would explain nearly all the associations among the background variables measured: one group of long-term Americans derived from families headed by a professional or a manager and with prestigious educational credentials, the other group of shorter-term Americans derived from less-privileged positions. Much of Auerbach's argument was framed by this fundamental dichotomy. Ladin- sky, Carlin, and Smigel also have suggested a bifurcated bar along these mutually reinforcing ethnic and law school dimensions.28 More recently, Heinz and Laumann have suggested that the practicing bar is best characterized as consisting of two hemispheres: those elite practitioners with advantageous social backgrounds and with corporate clients, and a second group with fewer status endowments and with mainly persons for clients.29 When tested with our data, the two-class latent model produced a likelihood ratio chi- square of 31.02 with 25 degrees of freedom, indicating that the hypothesis of two latent status classes does not account very well for the degree of association observed among the background variables.3"

However, a model hypothesizing the presence of three latent classes did considerably better, producing a likelihood ratio chi-square statistic of 17.13

28. Jack Ladinsky, Careers of Lawyers, Law Practice, and Legal Institutions, 28 Am. Soc. Rev. 47 (1963); Jerome E. Carlin, Lawyers on Their Own: A Study of Individual Practitioners in Chicago (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962); Erwin O. Smigel, The Wall Street Lawyer: Professional Organization Man? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969).

29. Heinz & Laumann, Legal Profession, supra note 10. 30. All these models were estimated using an algorithm made available by Clifford Clogg, Unrestricted

and Restricted Maximum Likelihood Latent Structure Analysis: A Manual for Users (University Park: Population Research Office, Pennsylvania State University, 1977).



with 16 degrees of freedom.3' Thus, hypothesizing a three-class latent variable satisfactorily accounted for the observed associations among national origins, place of birth, father's occupation, and law school attended. The observed and expected frequencies under the hypothesis of three latent classes are presented in table 1. To obtain a substantive understanding of the latent classes, we will refer to the conditional probabilities that estimate the likeli- hoods of an individual having a particular attribute, such as place of birth, given that he is a member of a certain status class.

a) "Local Ethnics" O O The results presented in table 2 reveal that a latent class 1 board member was most likely to have attended a DLKM law school (p = .535) and that he was very unlikely to have attended a law school outside the Chicago area. He most probably had a father who was not a professional or manager (p = .811), and he most likely was born in the Chicago area (p = .775) to parents of whom at least one was foreign born (p = .675). Members of this latent class are recognized as representatives of the ethnic

TABLE 2 Estimates of Conditional Probabilities of Having an Attribute, Given Status-Class Membership

Local Local Aristo- Outside

Manifest Variables Ethnics crats Elites Law school: 1 2 3

University of Chicago ......... .274 .128 .184 Northwestern ................ .149 .280 .057 DLKM........................ .535 .269 .129 Eastern elite ................. .000a .231 .279 Other ....................... .041 .092 .352

Father's occupation: Professional/managerial ....... .189 .977 .401 Other....................... .811 .023 .599

Place of birth: Chicago area ................. .775 .619 .169 Other .......... ............ ..225 .381 .831

National origin: Both parents U.S. born ........ .325 .895 .840 One or both parents foreign

born ..................... .675 .105 .160

aRestricted to equal zero (see text note 28). NoTE: Probability of being in latent class (t= 1, 2, 3)

Latent Class 1 2 3

.299 .387 .314

31. The basic set of parameters to be estimated in the three-class model contains 23 parameters. The rank of the matrix of partial derivatives of the estimated manifest probabilities with respect to the basic set equals 22.

By restricting the parameter p41"= 0 (a terminal estimate obtained in the unrestricted model), the ranks of the two matrices are equal, and the model is locally identified. This restriction decreases the degrees of freedom from 17 to 16. See Clogg, supra note 30, and Goodman, Exploratory Latent Structure Analysis, supra note 27, for details.



bar found in studies of large metropolitan bars. Apparently having disadvan- tageous origins (i.e., an "ethnic" status, nonprofessional parents, and attendance at DLKM law schools), these lawyers achieved leadership status perhaps by having tied their careers to the growth of "ethnic" industries, or perhaps by their involvement in the ethnically based Chicago political machine. We can identify this level of the latent variable as representing a status class of "local ethnics." The latent structure analysis estimated that 29.907o of the governing elite were members of this status class.

b) "Local Aristocrats" 0E0 The conditional probabilities of members of latent class 2 having attended Northwestern, a DLKM school, or an eastern elite law school were almost equal (.280, .269, and .231, respectively), while probabilities of their having attended the University of Chicago or an "other" law school were much lower. The conditional probability that status class 2 members had professional or managerial fathers was near unity (p= .977); and it was also highly probable that they were locally born (p = .619) to American-born parents (p = .895).

Latent class 2 lawyers, while nearly as likely as latent class 1 lawyers to have been born in Chicago, represent quite a different segment of the bar from that represented in latent class 1. These lawyers commonly had high- status fathers and were long-term Americans as well. However, their attendance pattern across law schools was almost uniform. There does seems to be some tendency for this group, when compared to the other two groups, to be less likely to have attended the University of Chicago or other large midwestern law schools, and much more likely to have attended Northwestern, DLKM, or eastern elite law schools. This latent class seems to have possessed more social and economic advantages at the time of entrance into the profession than either of the other two classes identified within the governing elite. They carry with them into the legal profession their initial basis of high status within the larger society. This segment of the board is designated as the status class of "local aristocrats." Our analysis estimated that 38.7% of the board members belonged to this status group.

c) "Outside Educational Elites" O•O It was more likely for members of latent class 3 to have attended either an "other" law school (mostly large midwestern universities) (p = .352) or an eastern elite law school (p = .279). The probabilities of having a nonprofessional rather than a professional father were .60 to .40 for lawyers classified in latent class 3, a much closer balance than in the other two latent classes. However, the largest conditional probability of having been born outside the Chicago area belonged to latent class 3 (p= .831). Status class 3 members were quite likely to have had U.S.-born parents. Two factors most clearly distinguished status class 3 lawyers from the others, their nonlocal place of birth and their attendance at an eastern elite or large midwestern law school. Members of this status class tended to be third-generation Americans, but were heterogeneous with respect to the occupational class of their fathers. Since these lawyers lacked the local ties formed by childhood residence and later attendance at Chicago's law schools, they may well represent a segment of the governing



elite recruited on the basis of their educational credentials by large or medium-sized law firms. Since these lawyers did not have as high a social status as that observed for the local aristocrats, and since their origins were outside Chicago, and to a substantial extent their legal education took place outside Chicago, this latent class is termed the status class of "outside educational elites." It was estimated that 3 1.47o of the board members were of this status class. 2. Discussion

Our analysis indicates that the post-World War II leaders of the Chicago Bar Association can be characterized as an amalgam of three distinct groups, each with roots and quite possibly resources in a different segment of the social, occupational, and educational landscape. Furthermore, this configuration of elites suggests that the Board of Managers represents structural arrangements resulting from struggles and accommodations between different segments and interests in the Chicago legal profession. Each board member can now be thought of as a representative of one of the three distinct status classes.

The CBA "aristocrats," our status class 2, represent what may be viewed as the remnant of the original character of the CBA membership, an elite social club of high-status and successful practitioners. But as we know, the legal system expanded and so did the profession. The growth of commerce and the resulting increase in demand for legal services, the economic feasi- bility of the large firm, the diffusion of the Cravath system of recruitment to large firms,32 and large-scale rural-to-urban migration brought outside legal talent into Chicago. The numerical accommodation of the "aristocrats" to this "outside talent" is reflected in the existence of status class 3 board members.

Most at odds with the elite thesis advanced by Auerbach is the presence of a status class within the leadership representing the "ethnic" bar, a result indicating that a numerical accommodation has been made with Chicago's local ethnic bar. Undoubtedly the leaders assigned to this status class were prominent, wealthy, and established lawyers in Chicago. Their status char- acterisics, however, are quite distinct from those of leaders on the board who are classified in the other status classes. And their presence within the governing elite of the Chicago Bar Association stands as an exception to the pattern Auerbach described at the national level.

We are now positioned to speculate further about the significance of our status-class concept for interpreting the dimensions and texture of the professional projects pursued by Chicago Bar Association leaders. These three status classes seemingly have obtained representation within the CBA leadership cadre on the basis of different types of resources and of elite status. An ethnically segmented city with an ethnically based political machine provided

32. Robert T. Swaine, The Cravath Firm and Its Predecessors, 1819-1947, 2 vols. (New York: privately printed at Ad Press, 1946-48).



the institutional and organizational resources for the development of a parallel ethnic elite within the organized bar, a development perhaps unique to Chicago. This ethnic elite assumed positions alongside another segment of the governing class of the Chicago bar who drew upon their elite social and economic endowments to obtain positions of professional power. The pos- session of an elite education, a major component in Larson's theory, provided a resource convertible into a position of leadership for another group of elite members who were advantaged also by being long-term Americans.

Auerbach contended that segments within the bar periodically pressed claims at each other's expense. According to his argument, these claims, what we prefer to call local projects, were generated not only from status- class concerns of lawyers, but also from the concerns of typical clients served by different segments of the bar, as well as from the concerns of specific age cohorts. In the sections to follow, we test some of these contentions by com- paring practice characteristics and policy initiatives of the board members classified in the three status classes.

B. The Consolidation of Status and Practice Characteristics Auerbach's perspective on the historical development of legal elites related

the emergence of new elites to definite historical periods, to different substantive specializations, and to different sources of support within the wider community. Having established that the CBA leadership is differentiated on status-class attributes, we next investigated to what extent status-class characteristics of the board members correlated with differences between the board members' positions in the legal system.

To investigate these more extended questions and to determine if the status-class concept helps to interpret the composition of the CBA legal elite and their pursuits of local professional projects, we assigned each member of our sample of board members to one of the mutually exclusive status-class groups on the basis of the estimated modal probabilities listed in table 1. As an illustration, every board member who had both parents native born, who was born in the Chicago area, and who had a father in a high-status occupation was designated a local aristocrat regardless of the law school attended (table 1 shows 40 such board members). Additionally, board members who had both parents native born, who themselves were born outside Chicago, who had high-status fathers, but who had attended Chicago area law schools or an eastern elite school also were classified as local aristocrats (28 such lawyers). Finally, if a board member had at least one parent foreign born, he must have had a high-status father and must have attended Northwestern, an eastern elite, or an "other" (midwestern) law school to be classified as a local aristocrat (only 4 such lawyers)."33 By using the statistical estimates produced

33. Latent structure analysis produces probabilities for a respondent being in each of the three latent classes given a certain profile of the manifest variables. The modal conditional probability is the largest of these three values. The technique estimates these probabilities so that all the observed association among the manifest variables would disappear were there such a latent variable in the analysis. By assigning an in-



by latent structure analysis, we were actually able to code every board member into one of the three status classes that were theoretically defined by the procedure. The distributions of the background characteristics for each status class created in this manner are presented in table 3. Having assigned every board member to one of the three status classes, we then proceeded to compare status classes on several additional dimensions: age, practice setting, practice specialty, type of clients, and other organizational involvements.

1. Age Cohorts We first asked if the presence of local aristocrats on the board meant that

older, traditional members of the elite were clinging to power and control in the face of claims for increased access to leadership positions by younger mi-

TABLE 3 Percentages of Each Status Class with Certain Characteristics

%o (n) %o (n) %o (n) Local Ethnics Local Aristocrats Outside Elites

Law school: Chicago ..................... 29.2 (14) 15.3 (11) 13.6 (6) Northwestern ................ 12.5 (6) 27.8 (20) 4.6 (2) DLKM ......................... 56.2 (27) 25.0 (18) 11.4 (5) Eastern elite ................. .0.0 (0) 25.0 (18) 25.0 (11) Other ....................... 2.1 (1) 6.9 (5) 45.4 (20)

100.0 (48) 100.0 (72) 100.0 (44) Father's occupation:

Professional/managerial ....... 16.7 (8) 100.0 (72) 27.3 (12) Other...................... 83.3 (40) 0.0 (0) 72.7 (32)

100.0 (48) 100.0 (72) 100.0 (44) Place of birth:

Chicago ..................... 79.2 (38) 61.1 (44) 9.1 (4) Other...................... 20.8 (10) 38.9 (28) 90.9 (40)

National origin: Both parents U.S. born ........ 22.9 (11) 94.4 (68) 84.1 (37) One parent foreign born

........ 77.1 (37) 5.6 (4) 15.9 (7)

100.0 (48) 100.0 (72) 100.0 (44)

dividual to the latent class with the highest conditional probability of membership, we are able to actually create this theoretical variable. Take, e.g., those individuals whose parents were U.S. born, who themselves were Chicago born, whose fathers were professionals, and who attended the University of Chicago. Given this constellation of factors, latent structure analysis estimates that such an individual has a probability equal to .7882 of being a member of the local aristocracy, latent class 2 (see table 1). This is the largest conditional probability for any of the three classes. Table 1 shows that 6 board members actually possessed this set of characteristics. Latent structure analysis estimated that .7882 of these 6 individuals be- long to latent class 2. If we classify all these board members into latent class 2, we would misclassify (1- .7882), or .2118 of the individuals with such joint attributes; in this case approximately 1.27 persons would be misclassified. We can compute the estimated total number and percent of misclassifications by repeating this procedure. For the three-class latent model with the estimated modal conditional probabilities as given in table 1, we would correctly allocate 80.56% of the board members. This reasonably high value indicates that our latent variable, status class, can stand as a statistically reliable proxy for the pattern of association between the four background variables, and that little distortion is created by actually assigning members to classes on the basis of the largest estimated conditional probability. (Compare the estimated theoretical proportions reported at the bottom of table 2 to the actual proportions produced reported in table 3.)



grants to the city (the outside elite) and by younger, more status-conscious ethnic lawyers. We wanted to know whether members of each status class were remnants of the actual cohorts of lawyers defined by the historical events that have transformed the composition of the legal profession in Chi- cago.

There are indeed significant age differences between two of the three status classes, but in a direction contrary to the above speculation. Local aristocrats were on the average four years younger than outside elites at the time they first reached the board. While this difference is statistically significant at the .05 level, this result would not appear to be substantively very important much beyond the indication it provides that these status classes are better thought of as structural positions within the elite created by past adjustments to the changing profession than as members of the actual historical cohorts. The differences in average age between the local aristocrats and the outside elites were fairly consistent throughout the time period studied, failing to appear only during the 1960-64 period. Of substantively greater importance are the age distributions during the latest period of our study, 1970-74. During that period the number of lawyers on the board who were in their forties increased by 12.50%o from the preceding five-year period, and of board members in their forties during 1970-74, 62% were local aristocrats.

This finding substantiates two previous observations on the importance age differences have had in Chicago legal politics. We noted in our earlier article that the board members had a median age of slightly over 50 years during the period 1950-74, while the median age of the Chicago bar dramatically decreased during the same period.34 We speculated that this may have been, in part, responsible for the formation of the Chicago Council of Lawyers, a rival and more "liberal" bar association. Powell, in a more thorough analysis of this question, observed: "From 1970 on, however, there was always a 'seat' on the CBA Board of Managers for a young lawyer."" The data presented here indicated that while the older leaders of the CBA were willing to admit to their ranks younger members of the bar, these new elite members were recruited from the local aristocratic status class, a finding which begins to indicate the centrality of this status class in organizational politics. The analysis of age and status class did not establish any link between status classes and historical cohorts. 2. Practice Setting

We know that the status characteristics of individual lawyers remain correlated with the type of legal work and the place where legal work is performed. If this connection persists among the elite of the bar, then we would expect to see elites working in kinds of organizations and in substantive areas that are different for each status class, the specific patterns having been shaped by the original positions of the status classes in the legal sys-

34. Halliday & Cappell, supra note 1, at 740-44. 35. Michael Powell, Anatomy of a Counter-Bar Association: The Chicago Council of Lawyers, 1979

A.B.F. Res. J. 501, 538.



tem. Alternatively, if these elite members of the bar were able to escape the stratifying forces operating within the bar at large, no correlation between status-class membership and practice characteristics should appear. The bases of status may have been different at the outset of their careers, but the set of substantive interests of the different status classes would have become similar. Such a finding would provide indirect evidence for the argument that newer elites were co-opted.

Nearly 90%0/ of the CBA elite were solo or firm lawyers at the time they achieved board membership; the remaining 100/% were divided almost evenly between government and house counsel attorneys. Local ethnic elites, while they accounted for 29%/o of the leadership, accounted for 36% of those board members who were working for the government. Some evidence exists, then, for the contention that these lawyers used an alternative institutional base to reach leadership levels within the bar. Small frequencies in the government and house counsel cells prevented any definitive statistical tests, however. Because of the attention given to the opportunity for government practice provided to ethnic lawyers, especially in Chicago, the absence of large numbers of local ethnic lawyers in governmental practice was somewhat unexpected. When we made further comparisons between status classes using the criterion of whether board members had been in nonmili- tary government employment at any earlier time, we again found that local ethnics had more experience in government, but only slightly more than their counterparts.

A chart of the status-class composition of each practice setting appears in figure 1. First, note that the modal practice category was the small law firm with 10 or fewer attorneys, not the larger law firm. But also note that the largest 15 law firms alone produced nearly 20% of the board during this 25-year period, even though firms of this size account for no more than 6% of all firms in Chicago.36

When just the solo lawyers and firm lawyers were analyzed, however, even more pronounced and reliable associations between status class and practice setting were apparent. A test of independence between these two attributes produced a chi-square statistic of 29.50 with 6 degrees of freedom, a value significant at .01. The effects of social and educational factors on the allocation of lawyers to large-firm practice, so well established in the Chica- go bar as a whole, have not been attenuated within the elite. Well over 50% of the CBA board members who practiced in the largest 15 law firms were local aristocrats; more than 50%0/ of board members who were solo lawyers were local ethnics; and more than 50% of board members who practiced in medium-sized firms were outside elites. The extremes of the status-class and

36. The size distributions of Chicago law firms at 5-year intervals beginning with 1955 were obtained from the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory. Any board member who was employed by one of the largest 15 law firms identified at each 5-year interval and who served on the board during the 5-year period was considered employed by one of the largest firms in Chicago.



40 + OUTSIDER OUTSIDER OUTSIDER OUTSIDER

35 + OUTSIDER OUTSIDER OUTSIDER OUTSIDER OUTSIDER

30 + ARISTCRT ARISTCRT ARISTCRT ARISTCRT ARISTCRT OUTSIDER

25 + ARISTCRT OUTSIDER ARISTCRT OUTSIDER ARISTCRT OUTSIDER ARISTCRT OUTSIDER ARISTCRT OUTSIDER

zU 20 + ARISTCRT OUTSIDER LU ARISTCRT OUTSIDER OUTSIDER

ARISTCRT OUTSIDER OUTSIDER OUTSIDER ARISTCRT OUTSIDER OUTSIDER OUTSIDER ETHNICS OUTSIDER OUTSIDER

15 + OUTSIDER ETHNICS OUTSIDER OUTSIDER OUTSIDER ETHNICS OUTSIDER OUTSIDER ARISTCRT ETHNICS ARISTCRT ARISTCRT ARISTCRT ETHNICS ARISTCRT ARISTCRT ARISTCRT ETHNICS ARISTCRT ARISTCRT

10 + ETHNICS ETHNICS ARISTCRT ARISTCRT ETHNICS ETHNICS ARISTCRT ARISTCRT ETHNICS ETHNICS ARISTCRT ARISTCRT ETHNICS ETHNICS ARISTCRT ARISTCRT ETHNICS ETHNICS ARISTCRT ARISTCRT

5 + ETHNICS ETHNICS ARISTCRT ARISTCRT ETHNICS ETHNICS ETHNICS ARISTCRT ETHNICS . . . . ETHNICS ETHNICS

* .... ...ETHNICS ETHNICS

Solo Practice Small Firm Medium Firm Top-15 Firm

Fig. 1. Practice setting of CBA board members, 1950-74, by status class. (NOTE: A row of dots indicates missing data.)



practice hierarchies were highly consolidated; local aristocrats controlled or were a part of the largest and most influential law firms in Chicago; local ethnics were likely to bring a different set of interests with them to CBA board meetings.

3. Legal Specialties We used documented involvements of board members in specialty com-

mittees and associations as well as other records that clearly identified the member as a specialist of some sort to create a binary-coded specialty index." The specialty index for civil litigation was dichotomized according to whether a tie to a major corporate client could be established (discussed in the following section). The distribution of specialty involvements thus obtained for members of each status class are presented in table 4. Some differences are apparent. Local ethnic lawyers were most concentrated in the areas of civil litigation (corporate clients more than personal clients), matrimonial law, labor law, and personal injury law. Local aristocrats and outside elites practiced across the legal spectrum, but a comparison of the two shows that a larger proportion of outside elites practiced in tax, general corporate, and patent matters and that a larger proportion of local aristocrats practiced in antitrust, securities, and civil rights matters.

These data provide evidence that patterns of elite co-optation described by Auerbach do not strictly apply to the CBA leadership. Local ethnic board members, rather than having been based in large firms and corporate-oriented specialties, have instead used their success in the areas of practice that were open to them decades ago. The local aristocrats and outside elites tend to specialize in areas of law-patent, securities, tax, and antitrust-that are considered the high-prestige specialties.

4. Client Ties We were able to obtain information on the corporate clientele of the 99

board members who held office between 1965 and 1974. The information collected included whether the board member was a partner in a law firm at the same time that he or another partner served on a corporation's board of directors, whether the board member was employed as corporate house counsel, and whether his firm had received legal fees from the major publicly held corporations based in northern Illinois."3 A board member was said

37. Halliday & Cappell, supra note 1, at 735-40. 38. A client profile was constructed for every Chicago law firm having a partner or associate on the

CBA Board of Managers from 1965 to 1974. Using information obtained from the sources cited below, we compiled a list of each law firm's publicly reported clients. Each client was then classified in 1 of 23 industrial categories by its principal product or activity as reported in Standard and Poor's Register of Cor- porations, Directors, and Executives. Each law firm was assigned a score of 0 or 1 for each of the industries, indicating the presence or absence of a client tie. Finally every individual board member was assigned a score for each industry based on the affiliation of his firm or on the board member's status as house counsel. Sources included: The Becker Guide, published annually since 1965 with varying title, e.g., The A.G. Becker Guide to Publicly Held Corporations in the Chicago Area, 1966 Edition (Chicago: A.G. Becker & Co., 1966), and The Becker Guide to Publicly Held Corporations in the Chicago Area 1974-75 (10th ed. Chicago: A. G. Becker & Co., 1974); Spencer Phelps Harris, ed., The Legal Connection: Cor-



TABLE 4 Specialty Interest Index for CBA Board Members, 1950-74, by Status Class

Percent (n) in Specialty Local Ethnics Local Aristocrats Outside Elites Total

Percent in each status class .. 27.1 39.1 33.8 (56) (81) (70) (207)a

Antitrust ................. 14.3 71.4 14.3 (1) (5) (1) (7)

Banking/commercial ....... 26.3 42.1 31.6 (5) (8) (6) (19)

Civil litigation/corporation .. 57.9 15.8 26.3 (11) (3) (5) (19)

Civil litigation/personal .... 25.0 50.0 25.0 (4) (8) (4) (16)

Civil rights ............... 23.1 46.2 30.8 (3) (6) (4) (13)

Corporate ................ 28.6 14.3 57.1 (2) (1) (4) (7)

Criminal.................. 33.3 44.4 22.2 (6) (8) (4) (18)

Insurance ................ 33.3 29.2 37.5 (8) (7) (9) (24)

Laborb .................. 52.6 21.1 26.3 (10) (4) (5) (19)

Matrimonialb ............. 60.0 15.0 25.0 (12) (3) (5) (20)

Municipal ................ 50.0 20.0 30.0 (5) (2) (3) (10)

Patentb .................. 0.0 41.7 58.3 (0) (5) (7) (12)

Personal injury ........... 43.5 30.4 26.1 (10) (7) (6) (23)

Probate ................. 20.0 40.0 40.0 (4) (8) (8) (20)

Realestate ............... 31.6 26.3 42.1 (6) (5) (8) (19)

Securities ................ 25.0 50.0 25.0 (2) (4) (2) (8)

Tax ..................... 25.0 32.1 42.9 (7) (9) (12) (28)

aSample size was 207 because of data missing on 12 members. A member may be a specialist in more than one area.

bDifferences between status classes significant at .10 level, chi-square tests for independence.

porations and Law Firms (Menlo Park, Cal.: Data Financial Press, 1979); Outside Counsel: Inside Direc- tor: Lawyers on the Boards of American Industry (New York: Law Journal Press, 1973, 1974): Outside Counsel: Inside Director: The Directory of Lawyers on the Boards of American Industry (New York: Law Journal Press, 1977; Law Journal Seminars-Press, 1979); Standard and Poor's Register of Corporations, Directors, and Executives, 3 vols. (New York: Standard & Poor's Corporation, published annually since 1928).



to have a link to a major corporate client if any of the above relationships were present during the period that he served on the CBA board. Corpora- tions were classified according to industry sector. These data are presented in table 5.

Again, small cell sizes in the tables used to make tests of independence warrant some reservations about the extent of the differences between status classes, but note that more differences appear in the analysis of client ties than appeared for legal specialties (table 4). Local ethnics apparently were not very likely to have ties to major corporations; only in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries did this status class have any degree of link- age to corporate clients. On the other hand, local aristocrats were tied to corporate clients in every industrial sector to an extent even greater than the

TABLE 5 CBA Board Members' Links to Major Corporate Clients, 1965-74, by Status Class

Percent (n) with Link to Major Corporate Client Local Ethnics Local Aristocrats Outside Elites Totala

Percent in each status class .. 34.0 37.1 28.9 (33) (36) (28) (97)

Metalsb .................. 12.9 48.4 38.7 (4) (15) (12) (31)

Financeb ................ 8.7 56.5 34.8 (2) (13) (8) (23)

Insurance ................ 22.7 40.9 36.4 (5) (9) (8) (22)

Publishingb .............. 6.2 50.0 43.8 (1) (8) (7) (16)

Retail ................... 12.5 43.75 43.75 (2) (7) (7) (16)

Transportb ............... 0.0 61.5 38.5 (0) (8) (5) (13)

Utilitiesb ................. 0.0 69.2 30.8 (0) (9) (4) (13)

W holesale ................ 15.4 61.5 23.1 (2) (8) (3) (13)

Electronicsb .............. 8.3 66.7 25.0 (1) (8) (3) (12)

Trustsb .................. 9.1 63.6 27.3 (1) (7) (3) (11)

W ood ................... 18.2 54.5 27.3 (2) (6) (3) (11)

Pharmaceuticals .......... 20.0 50.0 30.0 (2) (5) (3) (10)

Real estate ............... . 11.1 55.6 33.3 (1) (5) (3) (9)

aSample size was 97; subtotals are larger because of multiple client ties.

bDifferences between status classes significant at .10 level, chi-square tests for independence.



outside elites were. While the local aristocrats served clients all around the monopoly board, they were particularly concentrated in the utilities, elec- tronics, trusts, wholesale, and transport sectors. In those areas, local aristocrats were overrepresented, having a share nearly twice their proportion on the board during that period. These findings again point to the highly consolidated structure of law practice and status-class characteristics that gave to the local aristocrats a more consistent elite status than the other two status classes had. Outside elites had more ties than expected on statistical grounds alone to clients in the retail, publishing, transport, metals, and insurance sectors-sectors that are sensitive to market conditions.

5. Organizational Involvement Studies of other types of institutional elites have found different rates of

actual organizational involvement among the elites. For example, Soref found that the highest strata of the business elite in his study were not likely to be involved in the actual governing of the organizations of which they were directors.39 It may be true that the legal elite of the CBA had different rates of involvement as well.

Relatively complete histories of involvements in CBA committees were available for the CBA board members in our sample. We constructed additional codes for the degree of involvement in committees dealing with the formulation and review of legislation, with the review and evaluation of the judiciary, and with the internal government of the association (such as the Committee on Committees and the Nominating Committee). In each of these areas, we tabulated for each board member the total number of years served on a relevant committee or committees before becoming a board member. The involvements in the legislation-related committess did not dif- fer for the three status classes: all averaged about one year. But in judicial committees local ethnics were more involved than the board members of other status classes, averaging 2.3 years of service, compared to 1.6 years for local aristocrats and 1.4 years for outside elites.

When the levels of involvement in internal governing committees of the CBA were examined, even more substantial differences were found. Local aristocrats averaged 4.2 years of involvement in governing the CBA before reaching the board; local ethnics averaged 3.2 years; and outside elites, 1.9 years. The difference between local aristocrats and outside elites is statistically significant at the .05 level. Each status class had higher membership frequencies on house committees than on the legislative and judicial committees, a finding indicating that there is a real dimension of professional politics within the organized bar. All members of the Board of Managers have tra- veled a path of service to the association, but local aristocrats have had the highest levels of experience in governing the association.

39. Michael Soref, Social Class and a Division of Labor Within the Corporate Elite: A Note on Class, Interlocking, and Executive Committee Membership of Directors of U.S. Industrial Firms, 17 Soc. Q. 360 (1976).



Different rates of involvement in the governance of other civic, political, and economic organizations have been observed for other institutional elites. Useem, for example, has found that higher-status business elites, "the inner group," were more likely than other business elites "to be involved directly in the governance of a range of institutions." He suggests that such participation may have developed a class of political leadership capable of promoting the more general interests of the capitalistic class, rather than individualized special interests.40 Even more relevant for our analysis were the findings of Dye et al. regarding the involvements of elite New York lawyers: "Senior partners in top Wall Street law firms are not interlocked in directorships of major corporations and banks. Indeed, for the most part, top lawyers appear to be 'specialists'. . ... Top leaders in government are recruited primarily from the legal profession."4' However, Halzman and Domhoff reanalyzed Dye's data and reached substantively different conclusions. They found that frequently the top Wall Street law firms that produced 56.1% of the government leaders included in Dye's analysis also had one of their attorneys serving as a corporate director.42 These top law firms linked business elites to government elites.

We determined the extent of the CBA elites' attainment of leadership positions in the institutional domains of business, government, religion, politics, and civic service by giving board members a code for involvement if they had served at any time in an executive capacity in any organization located in the institutional spheres listed above. Of the CBA elites, 82 had at some time been employed in the government sector, but only 4 had served as an executive in government, with each status class having at least one of the 4. A substantial number, 22, of the elite had served as leaders in religious organizations, local ethnics most often. Nine members were identified as being leaders of political parties, committees, or organizations, but suprisingly, only 2 of these were local ethnics. By far the greatest involvement was found in directing civic organizations, 54 (26%) of the CBA elites were civic leaders. Local aristocrats accounted for 46% of the CBA elite who were identified as civic leaders. In- volvements in the business sector produced different rates for the different status classes that were statistically significant at the .05 level. Of the 16 elite members who were also directors of corporations or business policy associations, 10 were outside elites, and only 1 was a local ethnic. Thus, while local aristocrats apparently were slightly more likely to have major corporate clients than were the outside elite members, the outside elites apparently had stronger and more direct ties with specific business interests. 6. Discussion

Our analysis of a local and well-defined legal elite indicates that Auer-

40. Michael Useem, The Social Organization of the American Business Elite and Participation of Cor- poration Directors in the Governartce of American Institutions, 44 Am. Soc. Rev. 553, 553 (1979).

41. Thomas Dye, Eugene DeClercq, & John Pickering, Concentration, Specialization, and Interlock- ing Among Institutional Elites, 54 Soc. Sci. Q. 8, 20, 26 (1973).

42. Harold Halzman & William Domhoff, Corporations, the Civic Sector, and Government: Do They Interlock? 9 Insurgent Sociologist 121 (Fall 1979 & Winter 1980).



bach's generalizations have at least one exception. In Chicago, three distinct status classes within the governing elite of the CBA were linked to a variety of organizational and institutional resources: elite clients, government, large dominant law firms, business organizations, and civic groups. What is interesting, of course, is that the stratification system which operates in the bar has created an amalgam of bar leaders, separate status classes within the elite, based in different segments of Chicago's complex political, economic, and social communities.

The statistical analysis of background and educational attributes first produced a heuristic classification of the elite. Our subsequent analysis has substantiated that the three separate status classes identified-local ethnics, local aristocrats, outside elites-represented the segments within the bar produced and organized by historical developments within the profession. Con- trary to Auerbach's generalizations regarding the composition of his ill-defined legal elite, the local ethnics in the Chicago bar have captured a substantial portion of the leadership positions. Furthermore, these local ethnics apparently have not been institutionally co-opted, that is, they have not aban- doned the areas of law and forms of practice occupied by their constituents in the bar. In our study, they were most likely to be successful solo or small-firm lawyers with substantive specialties traditionally associated with that type of practice-matrimonial, criminal, and personal injury law. Their involvement with major corporate clients was negligible. They were involved in CBA committees dealing with judicial politics more than their counterparts in other classes.

The identification of an outside elite status class provided a second elaboration on Auerbach's theme. Those members of the elite were most concentrated in medium-firm practice, practiced a full range of substantive law, and were linked to a variety of major corporate clients. Members of that status class were also much more likely to have held executive positions in busi- nesses or business associations. We can speculate that this greater and more direct involvement with the business sector provided alternative organizational and institutional resources useful in attaining professional elite status.

The local aristocrats were clearly the elite within the elite. Their status-class characteristics and professional characteristics were almost totally consolidated. That group most closely corresponds to Auerbach's characterization of the traditional elite within the legal profession. Having originated from the best social and class positions and having attended for the most part local or elite law schools, these lawyers were more likely to be involved with run- ning two important types of organizations-the largest law firms and civic associations-in addition to one of the largest bar associations in the coun- try. The diversity of the sources of their status and influence may well have afforded them a degree of professional autonomy not available to the other elite segments. This, along with the occupational inheritance of professional status, leads us to speculate that if a professional consciousness exists among the leaders of the bar, it would most likely be articulated by the local aristocrat status group.



We next address the question of whether these status-class differences were transformed into status and class struggles among the elite of the CBA. First, we investigated the circulation of status classes as they came into and left membership on the board. We will show how this pattern of circulation of elites broadly correlated with the local professional projects pursued by each separate status class.

III. THE CIRCULATION OF LEGAL ELITES AND LOCAL DIMENSIONS OF THE PROFESSIONAL PROJECT

The three status classes we have identified within the legal elite were produced by historical and social forces. Movements of members of the three status classes into and out of membership on the Board of Managers were patterned, and the pattern reflects struggles that transformed the government of the CBA. Just as there was variety among the elites who served as managers of the CBA, so was there variety in the projects pursued by these different segments of the bar. The dynamic political history of the CBA elite indicates that the structural accommodation to include local ethnic elites was paralleled by a change in the local version of the professional project that pertained to judicial politics and the regulation of legal practice. We argue that this accommodation was the organization's solution to earlier conflicts that originated in the narrowly based projects of legal elites during the late 1950s.

Our elaboration of Larson's notion of a professional project invites a more local, more chronological, and more analytical investigation of the production and circulation of legal elites and the policies they pursued in Chicago. The general histories compiled by Larson and by Auerbach do not lead to a systematic set of expectations about the composition or content of a local project. Larson has little to say about the circulation of elites or about the actual dimensions that differentiate one set of political objectives from another within the bar. Auerbach was ambiguous. He did observe that the 1950s were notable because: "For the first time, minority-group lawyers in significant numbers gained access to the professional elite in private practice."'3 But his overall conclusion was that no significant transformation of the elite took place. In fact, it can be surmised that the static composition of the elite was a major reason for his viewing the profession as having aban- doned the poor and powerless. In his final admonition to the profession, he stated: "If the practice of law is to become a public profession, not remain a private club, new values and voices are necessary."" Our analysis has already shown that among the CBA leadership, if not different values and voices, at least different faces had begun to gather around the table at the luncheon meetings.

The particular economic, social, and political environments of Chicago have provided the content of many aspects of the Chicago bar's project. Per-

43. Auerbach, supra note 7, at 232. 44. Id. at 308.



sonal injury law, long a mainstay of legal practice in Chicago, stems from Chicago's early prominence as a railway center. As the transportation industries grew, so did the law of torts and insurance; correspondingly, the importance and influence of the personal injury bar grew."' The personal injury bar is not only seriously and rancorously divided between plaintiff and defendant allegiances, but this division is reinforced along ethnic lines, local ethnic lawyers having been more likely to advocate on the plaintiff side. It is reasonable to expect that segments of the bar so divided in Chicago will have been divided over the definition of the local professional project.

Besides the presence of a large personal injury bar, the presence of a local, ethnically based political machine has created several contingencies with which the organized bar has had to cope. Control of local government meant control of the municipal court system. This domain of practice is central to the portion of the local bar that specializes in litigation. Indeed, judicial politics has been divisive within the organized bar, as we will see.

All of these issues were well defined before the period investigated in our study. Yet we have found these persistent issues to be central to our understanding of how, in a diverse and changing environment, different segments of the Chicago bar have played out their particular, and when possible their collective, versions of the professional project. Our analysis begins with a general outline of the systematic movements of status-class members into and out of membership on the CBA board. These movements are placed in the historical context of various local professional projects. Finally, the projects that pertained to unauthorized practice, lawyer discipline, and judicial politics are examined and explained in terms of status-class conflicts.

A. The Circulation of Status Classes

Although the Board of Managers of the CBA can be divided into three different and sizable segments, the three status classes did not stand in equal proportions to one another during the period studied. Our task in this section is to demonstrate that the fluctuations of status classes were nonrandom and followed from the particular political and legal developments taking place from 1950 to 1972.

The smoothed three-year averages of the number of board members from each status class are plotted in figure 2. There is evidence of a substantial increase in the observed proportion of local ethnic lawyers who served on the board during this period. Before 1960, the percentage of identified local ethnics on the board exceeded 3007o once; after 1960, the percentage exceeded 30% in all years but two, 1970 and 1972. This observation is consistent with what Auerbach has led us to expect from his discussion of the ethnic politics of the organized bar in general during this earlier period. This finding is nev- ertheless somewhat striking, given the long-standing ethnic communities and political regime characterizing Chicago. Apparently, as noted in the preced-

45. Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law 409-27 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973).



ing section, the leadership of the CBA has accommodated the ethnic bar but increased this accommodation most dramatically only after 1961.

While local ethnics were increasing their proportion on a board whose size was fixed at 21 members, at whose expense were they doing so? During the period 1961-70, the increasing number of local ethnics on the board seems to have displaced the outside elites. In fact, after 1956, the patterns of participation of local ethnics and local aristocrats are nearly identical and in phase. Both status classes lost seats on the board to the outside elites beginning around 1953 and continued doing so for nearly a decade.

These findings suggest a systematic pattern of the circulation of CBA leaders. If we may graft onto this dynamic history a competitive characterization, we may say that the struggle for seats on the CBA Board of Managers occurred between the outside elites and the local aristocrats, but it occurred also, and with slightly more contention, between the outside elites and the local ethnics. The two characteristics that most strongly differentiated the outside elites from the other two status classes were their place of origin and the site of their legal education, both outside Chicago. Table 3 (above) shows 91% of the outside elites originating outside Chicago and 70% of them re-

13.0-

12.0-

11.0-

10.0-

9.0-

8.0-

d 6.0

3.0 -

2.0- Local aristocrats Outside elites Local ethnics ---------

1.0-

S

I I

II '51 '52 '53 '54 '55 '56 57 '58 '59 '60 '61 '62 '63 '64 '65 '66 '67 '68 '69 '70 '71

Midpoint Year for 3-Year Average

Fig. 2. Smoothed three-year averages of status-class participation on the CBA Board of Managers, 1951-71.



ceiving their legal education outside Chicago, both percentages much higher than for the other two status classes. It seems plausible to argue that this group of elites would be most removed from the local, urban, ethnic bar and from Chicago's machine politics.

The formation of the Chicago Council of Lawyers in 1969 can be better understood in the context of these findings. It appears from reviewing the leadership and membership of this "counter" bar association (the CCL) that the group closely approximates a liberal element of the outside educational elite status class."6 Not only were the younger CCL members likely to be frus- trated by the long period of organizational apprenticeship required before reaching positions of leadership in the CBA, they also were joining the bar at a time when a large segment of the bar, the local ethnics, were successfully pressing for leadership positions. The increased number of local ethnic elites serving on the CBA board combined with the resurgence of local aristocrats during the same period may have contributed to the establishment of the CCL.

The cyclical pattern to the three series describing status-class participation can be interpreted by referring to changes in the political environment during the same period. At first it may seem unlikely that a bar association would be responsive to municipal, state, and federal political trends, but there were and remain several reasons why the Chicago Bar Association, or for that matter any bar association, would be sensitive to such changes. First, there is a natural concern with the administration of justice and the state government. Lawyers benefit from having an organized base from which to influence and interact with elected and appointed officials. Correspondingly, lawyers well placed in these political systems may be in a position to translate political status into professional status. Second, the organized bar benefits from any "inside" information it can obtain about governmental policies and intentions. Thus an alignment along status-class lines between the governing elites of the bar and the dominating political party may better facilitate such interactions. The third reason for the correspondence of the cycles may be more a historical coincidence than an inevitable development; the success of the Democratic party in capturing the municipal, state, and federal offices in 1960 strengthened the local political machine in Chicago even beyond its already existing power. Local ethnic elite lawyers were at home in this local legal and political culture.

The Cold War policies of the 1950s and a Republican state and federal administration favored the segment of the bar identified as outside elites, perhaps even more than they favored the local aristocrats. Auerbach has noted that Cold War ideologies renewed a nativism in the bar that brought into

46. Powell, supra note 35, at 532, 533, 540. Table 1 reported that 60% of the CCL leaders attended an elite law school (the only local school in that category being the University of Chicago); table 2 reported that CCL members were predominantly employed in firms of more than 30 lawyers; table 3 reported that CCL members were practicing law for business and professional clients; table 4 reported that Jewish lawyers and those with no religious preference were overrepresented in the CCL while Catholic lawyers were underrepresented.



question the activities of ethnic lawyers working as advocates of labor and the poor.47 There is evidence that the segments of the bar dominating CBA policies during this era were exposed to this initiative and acted during that period in a manner consistent with such orientations.48 Auerbach recounted the following instance:

Attorney General Tom Clark was the first to warn of impending danger and to propose palliatives. In a speech in 1946 to members of the Chicago Bar As- sociation, reprinted in the American Bar Association Journal, Clark described a plot by Communists, "outside ideologists," and "small groups of radicals" to undermine the nation. He condemned the "revolutionary" who "uses every device in the legal category to further the interests of those who would destroy our government, by force if necessary." These lawyers, he suggested, should be taken by bar associations "to the legal woodshed for a definite and well- deserved admonition."49

Four years later, in a famous case, George Anastaplo was denied admission to the bar by the CBA for his failure to respond on constitutional grounds to questions posed by the CBA Character and Fitness Committee that pertained to his political affiliations.50 Note that the outside elites began to dominate the Board of Managers at about this time and continued this domination until the election of John F. Kennedy.

Although Daley's first term as Chicago's mayor began in 1956, the election of 1960 had far greater consequences for the political structure of Chicago. In addition to having played an instrumental role in nominating and electing Kennedy, Daley also supported Otto Kerner, who was elected governor of Il- linois. This placed the administrative and judicial agencies of every level of government under Democratic party control and gave Daley personal access to both the governor and the president. The correspondence between this political transformation and the circulation of status classes on the CBA Board of Managers is striking. Both the local aristocrats and the local ethnics began their ascent in 1960 and reached their zenith in 1968 and 1967 respectively, coincident with the election of Republicans Richard Nixon as president and Richard B. Ogilvie as Illinois governor. These observations suggest that the internal political structure of the CBA was affected first by the constellation of power at the municipal, state, and federal levels and second by the internal struggle between the status classes within the profession for control over the institutions most relevant to their work. As we will see in the sections to follow, these struggles reflected status-class interests.

47. Auerbach, supra note 7, at ch. 8. 48. Terence C. Halliday, The Idiom of Legalism in Bar Politics: Lawyers, McCarthyism, and the Civil

Rights Era, 1982 A.B.F. Res. J. 911, indicates that even the Chicago Bar Association, which has received much criticism over its stance during the Cold War, may have had a considerably more complex and elaborate orientation to the abrogation of individual rights than Auerbach and other critics have allowed. While some bar association leaders and committees did reflect the temper of the times, others like the Civil Rights Committee strenuously sought to check the excesses of Congress and the Illinois legislature.

49. Auerbach, supra note 7, at 233. 50. In re George Anastaplo 18 Ill. 2d 182, 121 N.E.2d 826 (1954), 348 U.S. 946 (1955), 163 N.E.2d 429

(1960), 366 U.S. 82 (1961); Auerbach, supra note 5, at 251-53; Herman Kogan, The First Century; The Chicago Bar Association 1874-1974, at 229-31 (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1974).


No. 2 PROFESSIONAL PROJECTS OF ELITE LAYWERS 323

B. The Overall Character of the CBA's Professional Project An overview of the dimensions of the local professional project of the CBA

can be obtained by examining the committee structure of the association. What objectives are most important to the local bar should be evident from observing which committees are of substantial size and are organized for effective action, and evident also from the priorities implied by the kinds of experience represented in the CBA leadership. There is clear evidence on both counts that the various local projects of the CBA were conscious products commanding a sizable portion of the CBA'S resources.

The strongest evidence of this appears in the committee histories of the individual board members. Table 6 reports the percentage of board members having served on the 11 most-served-on committees. All of these are house committees-those that function to serve the occupation and the association. Compare the pattern of involvements for board members to the following ordered list of the most-joined committees by a sample of Chicago lawyers, figures that we obtained from the random survey of Chicago lawyers:"

% %o 1. Probate ............. 7.9 7. Antitrust ............ 5.5 2. Matrimonial law ....... 7.2 8. Criminal law ......... 5.3 3. Civil practice .......... 6.7 9. Defense of prisoners ... 5.0 4. Labor law ............. 6.4 10. Environmental law .... 3.8 5. Real property law ...... 6.1 11. Securities ............ 3.8 6. Corporate law ......... 5.8

Members of the bar at large have joined substantive law committees at higher rates than they have joined any of the house committees listed in table 6. CBA leaders, on the other hand, have allocated more of their time and effort to committees directly involved in professional politics than to substantive law committees.

In the three sections that follow, we will examine changes in the policies relating to three areas of professional governance apparently important in the careers of CBA leaders: policy initiatives in the area of the unauthorized practice of law, the disciplining of lawyers, and the politics of judicial selection and retention. In each of these areas, we find evidence of policy changes that appear to be related to the interests of the different status classes active in the areas at the times of the changes. In at least two of these areas, disciplining of lawyers and judicial politics, the changes involved conflict between members of different status classes.

1. Unauthorized Practice: The Definition and Defense of Role

The Committee on Unauthorized Practice had by 1956 become the largest CBA committee, listing approximately 60 members; by 1962 membership had

51. Heinz & Laumann, supra note 20.



expanded to 90."2 The purposes of this committee and the relevance of its activities for the professional project are clear:

The Committee on Unauthorized Practice hears all complaints relating to the unauthorized practice of law and investigates any practice or method of procuring or transacting business which constitutes unauthorized practice of law and which may be regarded as prejudicial to the public interest. Upon approval of the Board of Managers, the committee is charged with the duty of taking such action in the courts or before public officers as may be deemed ad- visable."

At various times, the organized bar has sought to regulate access to courts, to the profession, and to administrative agencies, and it has sought to curb excessive litigation, excessive fees, and ambulance chasing-all under the ru-

TABLE 6 Comparison of CBA Committee Involvement: CBA Board Members Versus Chicago Attorneys

Percent Participating in CBA Committees Board Chicago

Committee Membersa Attorneysb 1. Candidatesc ................ 37.1 2.6 2. Grievancesd ................ 30.5 1.8 3. Association meetings ........ 22.4 0.3 4. Unauthorized Practicee ....... 20.5 2.0 5. Inquiry ................... 19.5 2.9 6. Young Lawyers ............. 19.5 0.0 7. Legislativeg ................ 15.7 3.5 8. Ethics ..................... 15.2 2.9 9. Judiciaryh ................. 15.2 2.0

10. Membership ............... 15.2 1.5 11. Nominating' ............... 15.2 0.0

aBased on the 219 board members who served on the board 1950-74, n = 219.

bBased on cBA project's random survey of Chicago lawyers, n = 777; cf. Heinz & Laumann, supra text note 17.

CEvaluates qualifications of candidates for judicial office. dSecond stage of disciplinary proceedings; recommends board action or

stops proceedings. eNegotiates occupational boundaries with other groups; litigates against

trasgressors. 'First stage of disciplinary proceedings; investigates complaints, recom-

mends to grievances committee or stops proceedings. gScreens and technically evaluates substantive bills considered as part of

the cBA legislative package. hEvaluates sitting judges, recommends retention or rejection. iNominates candidates to cBA offices, tantamount to appointment to of-

fice.

52. Chicago Bar Association, Fourth Quarter-Annual Meeting: Annual Reports Submitted by Com- mittees in the Association Year 1956-1957; Group Reporting September 27, 1956, at p. 4 (58 members listed for Committee on Unauthorized Practice); annual report by Committee on Unauthorized Practice, 43 Chi. B. Rec. 508, 510 (1962).

53. Committees of the Chicago Bar Association (as revised and constituted 1956-1957), 38 Chi. B. Rec. 129, 134 (1956). Descriptions and duties of CBA's various committees are published regularly in Chicago Bar Record.



bric of unauthorized practice. The common wisdom regarding the motiva- tion for these policies has emphasized the economic self-interest of more marginal practitioners seeking to insulate themselves from market forces and economic downturns. However, our findings regarding the activities of the Committee on Unauthorized Practice, as well as a more general review of regulating the practice of law, challenge this interpretation. " We found that some of the prestigious practice areas were more likely than others to be protected from encroaching professions.

Two components of regulating unauthorized practice can be analytically identified: efforts directed at defining what constitutes the practice of law, that is, at constructing the role of "lawyering," and efforts directed at regulating occupancy of that role. In the late colonial and revolutionary periods, the profession sought to prevent nonlawyers from arguing in court." But more recently, emerging occupational groups have aggressively challenged the occupational hegemony of lawyers, which has resulted in litigation initiated by various bar groups; as we will see, the CBA was an active litigant. These actions transferred the struggle over economic opportunities out of the competitive marketplace and into the courtrooms.

The Chicago Bar Association was an early participant in these struggles, having formed a Committee on Unauthorized Practice in 1905. The period of active litigation, designed as much to enforce decisions already won as to generate new precedents, continued into the 1950s. The proportions of board members from the different status classes serving on this committee were not substantially different from one another except that both before and after 1962 the proportion of local aristocrats on the committee was larger than might be expected. Rather than being occupied with defending the fringes of the profession, this committee was engaged in struggles over substantive domains practiced by the elite of the bar.

In one case, the CBA strengthened the exclusive claim of lawyers to register with and to appear before the United States Patent Office.56 In years following, cases were pursued that reinforced patent attorney claims to exclusivity in patent and trademark matters, including trademark searches." The bar association successfully defended against an intrusion into condemnation proceedings by a firm of engineers.58 They also successfully enjoined the emerging financial professions from providing services related to estate planning.59

54. Barlow F. Christensen, The Unauthorized Practice of Law: Do Good Fences Really Make Good Neighbors-or Even Good Sense? 1980 ABF Res. J. 159.

55. Id. at 162-65. 56. Chicago Bar Ass'n v. Kellogg, 338 Ill. App. 618, 88 N.E.2d 519 (1949). The full opinion of the court

appeared in 31 Chi. B. Rec. 73 (1949). 57. Chicago Bar Ass'n v. Trademark Service Corp., 31 Chi. B. Rec. 85 (1949) (committee refers in its

annual report to its recommendation that CBA file a bill of complaint against Trademark Service); Chicago Bar Ass'n v. Stevens, 40 Chi. B. Rec. 500, 501 (1959) (committee comments on in its annual report).

58. Chicago Bar Ass'n v. Clausen, mentioned in Report of the Committee on Unauthorized Practice, 34 Chi. B. Rec. 54, 88 (1952); id., 40 Chi. B. Rec. 500, 501 (1959).

59. Chicago Bar Ass'n v. Financial Planning, Inc., mentioned in 40 Chi. B. Rec. 500 (1959).



The battle with accountants began with litigation that sought to prevent cer- tified public accountants from representing clients before administrative tax agencies and then moved to the floor of Congress.60 As the chairman of the Unauthorized Practice Committee in 1955 reported: "Not content with the Statement of Principles and thwarted by Court opinion, the accountants now travel Federal administrative and legislative roads to their goal."6' The accountants had been seeking to attach to the legislation prescribing the rules of practice before the Department of the Treasury a clause prohibiting "the Secretary of the Treasury from denying to any person 'the right to engage in such activities solely because he is not a member of any particular profession or calling.' ,"62 The CBA launched a letter-to-your-congressman campaign to defeat this attempt.

The decade of the 1960s was characterized by a series of compromises with other emerging professional occupations over what types of work could be shared with nonlawyers. In 1961, successful negotiations were completed with several banks, the Corporate Fiduciaries Association of Chicago, and the Attorney General, regulating the performance of estate-planning and probate matters.63 By 1966, the chairman of the committee could report: "During the past year, substantially all matters in which it appeared to the Committee that the unauthorized practice of law was involved were resolved amicably and regulated in an agreement to cease such practice."64

This period saw one notable compromise in which the lawyers were forced to surrender a portion of work previously monopolized by them. As a result of negotiations spurred by litigation, it was agreed that a uniform contract for real estate conveyance could be drafted by real estate brokers as well as by lawyers.65 In these earlier periods, the bar was nearly always successful in protecting its domain from engineers, accountants, financial analysts, and patent officials but lost ground to the real estate brokers.

It seems likely, given the composition of the elite in the earlier periods, that they more vigorously obstructed those occupations having professional projects of their own that most threatened the type of legal work engaged in by the directors of the bar association. Of course, as has been pointed out, the legal profession has since lost ground to these new powerful occupational groups.66 But it is interesting to note that it was not in the domains of the large corporate and federally oriented law practice that major concessions were first won by emerging professional groups with their own developed knowledge base; rather it was in the domain of routine real estate con-

60. Chicago Bar Ass'n v. United Taxpayers of America, 312 Ill. App. 243 (1941), commented on in 28 Chi. B. Rec. 117 (1946).

61. Statement of Committee on Unauthorized Practice in Opposition to H.R. 1601, 84th Congress, and Similar Legislation, CBA Board of Managers Transcripts file no. 55-93, May 9, 1955.

62. Id. 63. Annual Report of the Committee on Unauthorized Practice, 42 Chi. B. Rec. 502 (1961). 64. Annual Report of the Committee on Unauthorized Practice, internal CBA memo, 1967. 65. Id. at section reporting the Real Estate Broker-Lawyer Accord that developed from the matter of

Chicago Bar Ass'n v. Quinlan & Tyson, Inc. 66. Christensen, supra note 54.



veyances, an area of limited direct economic concern to large-firm lawyers. The leaders of the bar, the directors of the professional project, contributed to the eventual partitioning of the more routine legal work to other occupations in some areas and to the stalwart defense of professional monopoly in other, more prestigious areas.

One further correlation between the content of the project to regulate unauthorized practice and the composition of the leadership is worth men- tioning. In the early 1950s, the appropriateness of the salaried lawyer's providing services to collectivities was debated. The earliest opposition to this trend was directed against salaried lawyers employed by labor unions, as evidenced in this report of the Committee on Unauthorized Practice in 1959:

Continuing as a problem of major dimensions is the tendency of trade associations, corporations and unions to provide legal services to their members and employees. This trend, against which this Association struck a successful blow in last year's case of In re Railroad Brotherhood, 13 Ill. 2d 391, has been noted and comprehensively discussed in the May, 1959 issue of the Harvard Law Review. The author arrived at a conclusion on the subject contrary to the position taken by this Association and the views of this Com- mittee.67

When we compared the content of a 1969 report to that cited above, we saw that the concern over providing group services had been broadened and included a change in emphasis:

We have the problem of so-called 'captive' lawyers who may be the captives of insurance companies, banks, associations, or other lay agencies. Some lawyers, seeing the possibility for profit, join with lay groups and sometimes orga- nize the entire enterprise which will solicit the business, or might enter into a 'feeder' or 'kick-back' arrangement. Many of these cases involve the marginal lawyer who tries this way out of financial difficulty, but others involve the prosperous or prestigious lawyers who may welcome such means of procuring lucrative business.68

The organized bar's resistance to group legal services, largely accomplished by defining this activity as the unethical solicitation of business, was weak- ened by the changed status-class composition of the CBA leadership as well as by the increasing number of lawyers becoming employed as corporation house counsel. Having examined the policies of defining and defending the role of lawyering, we now describe the effects of elite composition on efforts to discipline practicing attorneys.

2. Disciplining the Profession

Two CBA committees and the Board of Managers had the responsibility to investigate claims of unethical or illegal conduct of lawyers (table 6). If charges were substantiated, the CBA Board could petition the Illinois Su-

67. Annual Report of the Committee on Unauthorized Practice, 40 Chi. B. Rec. 502 (1959). 68. Annual Report of the Committee on Unauthorized Practice, internal CBA memo, 1969.



preme Court for disbarment. In addition to the lawyer discipline committees, the Committee on Personal Injury often sought to discipline lawyers. In fact, most of the history of the self-disciplining of the profession involved the personal injury bar. In 1973, however, an autonomous body, the Attorney Reg- istration and Disciplinary Commission, was established and it removed the responsibility of discipline from the CBA. (Indeed there is evidence that the CBA gave away its longstanding obligations to discipline, in part because it was too expensive.)

There have been and continue to be several aspects to the organized bar's preoccupation with personal injury practice. The practice of personal injury law is divided into plaintiff and defendant specializations.69 This division along adversarial lines typically involves litigation with insurance companies as defendants and individuals as plaintiffs. The adversarial division is reinforced by ethnic segmentation. Laumann and Heinz, describing Jews as perhaps the most derogated of the ethnic groups substantially represented in the bar, found in 1974 that 32% of personal injury plaintiff lawyers reported a Jewish religious preference, about the same as for the Chicago bar in general (28%), but very few lawyers with upper-status backgrounds and Protestant religious preferences were active in this area of practice. Only 6% of the personal injury defense bar in the same study reported a Jewish religious preference.70

Within the plaintiff portion of the personal injury bar, the competition for clients has long been an issue. To the extent that a specialized bar has developed by utilizing aggressive client referral services, such as overt solicitation and advertising, the private practitioner relying on personal injury cases for only a portion of his work would be driven out of personal injury practice, which can produce sizable contingency fees.

The other expressed interests of the organized bar in regulating personal injury practice were those usual justifications for sanctioning lawyers: to protect the unsuspecting public from incompetent legal representation, to reduce court congestion, and to guarantee to the potential client his choice of legal counsel. However, as we will see, the vast majority of the CBA'S disciplinary activity in the 1950s sought to limit the aggressive and concentrated solicitation of personal injury cases by plaintiff lawyers.

From all of the above considerations, one might expect that the status- class divisions we observed on the board would be even more polarized when we looked at board members' participation on the Personal Injury Commit- tee. But status-class membership was not a useful predictor of past membership on this committee. Nor were there any meaningful differences between status classes with respect to membership on the two disciplinary commit-

69. From the results of the survey of the Chicago bar, it was estimated that the value of the average conditional probability at which the cluster of legal specialists containing personal injury plaintiff attorneys linked with the cluster of practitioners containing personal injury defense attorneys was below .10. In contrast, personal injury plaintiff attorneys linked with divorce attorneys at a value near .60. Laumann & Heinz, Organization of Lawyers' Work, supra note 10, at 236 fig. 1.

70. Laumann & Heinz, Specialization and Prestige, supra note 10, at 184-85, 169-71 table 2.



tees, Grievance and Inquiry. In a personal injury bar of such long standing, it is quite likely that some form of structural accommodation had already taken place at the committee level before the time examined in our study.

That is not to say that the CBA was completely balanced in its approach to these issues or that it was neutralized by equal numbers of antagonistic pro- ponents. In 1954, a Board of Managers dominated by outside elites invoked its most extreme professional sanction:

Late in 1954, a petition for the disbarment of E. Heirich was filed with the state Supreme Court. Complaints against him had been received during four preceding years. With 1,891 pages of testimony from 18 witnesses, the Grievance Committee recommended Heirich's removal from the rolls of practicing attorneys because of "a general pattern of misconduct which proved and which indicate beyond any doubt that the respondent has been guilty of conduct involving moral turpitude and because of innumerable instances of soliciting himself or through emissaries many clients, especially those involved in railroad accidents." Nearly two years passed before the high court rendered a decision that not only rejected the Association's recommendation and upheld Heirich's countercharge that seven railroads had organized and fi- nanced a Railroad Claims Research Bureau whose special investigator amassed evidence against him through "subornation, trickery, entrapment and false impersonation," but also went on to commend Heirich for "pursuing the personal injury business successfully and aggressively.""7

It seems clear, not only from this instance but from the CBA's general lack of success in the courts during this period as well, that the actions taken against members of the plaintiff side of the personal injury bar were excessive and in- spired by an alignment of key committee and board members with links to corporations vulnerable to the claims pursued by the plaintiff bar.

Having been defeated in their efforts to restrain a portion of the plaintiff bar by using the regular procedures of sanctioning wayward attorneys, the CBA initiated a legislative effort in the 1950s, a period when local ethnic representation on the board was at a low point. The proposed legislation sought to impose a jail sentence on solicitation and to empower the state's attorney to enjoin specific parties from further solicitation. The legislation was drafted and modified in the 1950s but was never successfully passed, in part because of the opposition of labor unions. An analysis of one of the major efforts at drafting such legislation during 1954-56 reveals the politics involved in the disciplining of attorneys.

The proposed legislation would have established the solicitation of clients as a violation of statutory law. Under the law in 1954, no prohibition against solicitation existed; the profession relied upon its charter with the state to enforce the Canons of Ethics against solicitation of clients. From a technical standpoint, we can see that there was no need to legislate the "offense"; legal mechanisms already had been established to enforce the professional prohibition against solicitation. This was duly noted during the consideration of

71. Kogan, supra note 50, at 229.



this bill by at least two of the board members, one of whom also recognized a further implication of the legislation: "I don't want any jury sending lawyers to jail."72 In a clear manner, this proposed legislation would reduce the autonomy of the profession, ostensibly one of the fundamental elements of any profession's global project. Only a seriously divided bar would jeopardize this portion of the project to increase the control over a specialized group of practitioners.

The parties in interest to this proposed legislative change included railroad companies, insurance corporations, labor unions, and of course, the segments of the bar aligned with those interests, the defense and plaintiff bar respectively. There is solid evidence that those advocates of stringent sanc- tions on solicitation were linked to the industries that had most to gain by limiting the number of personal injury claims. At the outset of the campaign in 1954 the chairman of the Personal Injury Committee wrote to the Board of Managers: "As you know, the Chicago Bar Association has access to an investigation bureau maintained by the railroads, and to information collected by the Claims Bureau of the Association of Casualty and Surety Com- panies."73 The report then went on to describe how these reports had been used to identify those lawyers pressing large numbers of personal injury claims and concluded: "It is the opinion of our Committee that it is unlikely for this group of attorneys to be retained in so many personal injury cases through conventional sources."'4

The plaintiff's bar also had strong opinions on this type of legislation, and the leadership of the bar in Chicago was aware of the consequence of one- sided legislation:

In St. Louis, a number of years ago, there was a movement of the Bar Associa- tion to do something about ambulance chasing, and the first thing you knew they had two associations in St. Louis, the ambulance chasers and the regular bar association. ... . We see threats of that same sort of thing here now."

Care was taken not to pack the subcommittees drafting the legislation with agents of insurance and railroad industries. The presence of an attorney with a plaintiff's orientation on the CBA board during this period was undoubtedly no coincidence. This attorney, a solo practitioner whose only identified specialty was personal injury cases and who was a local ethnic by our classification, had no problem with the behavior of personal injury lawyers, but he was able to support aspects of the bill:

He is under the discipline of the Supreme Court. . . . But the difficulty we have had up to date is that there is no prohibition on the part of an individual

72. Report of the Legislative Committee Concerning Proposal to Prohibit the Solicitation of Legal Business, CBA Board of Managers Transcripts, file no. 56-87, Dec. 13, 1956.

73. Report from the Committee on Personal Injury Practice, Investigations into the Practices of Am- bulance Chasing, CBA Board of Managers Transcripts, file no. 54-72, June 1, 1954.

74. Id. 75. Report of the Committee on Personal Injury Practice Re Proposed Legislation to Prohibit Solicita-

tion of Legal Business Arising out of Personal Injury or Death, CBA Board of Managers Transcripts, file no. 54-75, June 14, 1954.



who is not an attorney, no way of disciplining him. ... [I]n the Stock Yards District, the police found a man handing out cards, a lawyer's cards. What should they do? There was nothing they could do, nothing on the statutes. This gives a leverage for the police to get after him.76

The bill eventually approved by the board sanctioned the nonlawyer for soliciting claims and enjoined personal injury defense lawyers and claims agents from obtaining releases for 20 days from the date of the accident. The merging of objectives-those of established personal injury and other solo practitioners to limit competition and those of agents of railroad and insurance companies to limit claims-produced a bill that, if passed, would have imposed fines of up to $1,000 or would have imprisoned an individual for up to a year for distributing information regarding the availability of legal services. The bill did not pass in the legislature.

The campaign to limit solicitation by personal injury plaintiff lawyers continued in spite of the legislative defeat. In a subsequent modification of the bill, lawyers as well as nonlawyers were included in the prohibition. The fundamental objectives contained in the new bill were (1) to establish a two-year maximum prison term for any person or his employee found guilty of soliciting legal business either indirectly or directly and (2) to create enabling rules granting to the attorney general or any person against whom a claim was brought the right to file for an injunction against those pursuing the claim, if the claim was solicited.77 The bill differed markedly from that of two years earlier in that it made no explicit reference to personal injury practices. In this regard, the report recommending board approval explained:

The drafting group does not, nor do we, offer this bill as a cure for all the evils in the chasing racket. Previous bills sponsored by this Association have had broader purpose, but these have drawn such opposition that it is questionable that any member of the Legislature can be induced to introduce another such.

. [I]t is believed that current circumstances offer an opportunity, not here- tofore existent, to enhance the chances of passage. Among these circumstances are the refusal of the Illinois Supreme Court to uphold the Association in disbarment recommendations, the new awareness and interest of downstate lawyers, the publicity current in our local press and the activity of the American Bar Association.78

As the debate on this proposed legislation unfolded, it became evident at an early stage that the board members were very much concerned about the vulnerability of all lawyers to the general prohibition against solicitation. Without a clear and precise definition of solicitation, they were drawing a fine line between what the lawyers understood clearly to be solicitation in personal injury matters and the common referral networks all lawyers use in obtaining business. But precise definitions would mobilize the opposition:

76. Id. 77. Report of Legislative Committee Re Proposal to Prohibit Solicitation of Legal Business, CBA

Board of Managers Transcripts, file no. 56-87, Sept. 13, 1956. 78. Id., Aug. 6, 1956.



personal injury plaintiff's attorneys and labor unions. Imprecise language created the possibility that juries might draw that fine line differently. Before they voted approval of an amended version, the board members had to be convinced that other areas of practice would not be affected. During the debate one member, in reporting his conclusions from a review of the results of nearly identical legislation implemented in other states, said, "except for the fellow advertising in the paper, and so forth, I don't think we have had a solicitation case that wasn't a personal injury case.""79

Other aspects of the debate unfolded much as in the earlier bills. Two of the new board members participating in the debate were identified as personal injury defense lawyers, one with a railroad as a client. These lawyers defended the policies of railroads and cited large numbers of claims filed by only a few attorneys as evidence of impropriety. Two changes to the proposed bill were successfully introduced by the same personal injury lawyer (plaintiff's orientation) who had been involved in the debate two years earlier: the right to obtain an injunction was limited to the attorney general-if not so limited, he argued, railroads and insurance companies would seek in- junctions in all cases, slowing and complicating the proceedings; and the behavior punishable by a two-year prison term was reduced from felony to mis- demeanor. This revised bill, in spite of its attempts to compromise and to dif- fuse the focus on the personal injury plaintiff bar, also failed to pass in the legislature.

One of the major objectives of the global project of lawyers, to establish in the public's mind a credibility regarding the autonomous disciplining of attorneys, had been threatened. Class politics motivated CBA leaders to seek additional support from the state in regulating only a portion of the bar. These actions exposed a divided bar and a leadership willing to surrender global objectives of the profession to pursue more limited interests. The CBA moved in this direction because a weak coalition was established between personal injury defense attorneys seeking to reduce the number of claims on one side and, on the other, personal injury plaintiff lawyers willing to reduce the competitive advantages enjoyed by some plaintiff lawyers. The circulation of local ethnics onto and off the board shows that the participation of local ethnics was much lower than the participation of the two other status classes initially. From these relatively low participation levels, their number did increase by one or two during the period of debate. In terms of composition, local ethnics and a portion (we have argued a conservative portion) of the personal injury plaintiff bar influenced the leadership of the CBA, but not to an extent sufficient to check the unbalanced direction given to this dimension of the professional project.

The dissent of the plaintiff bar was formalized in 1961 when well-established plaintiff's attorneys presented an alternative slate of candidates for the

79. Id., Dec. 27, 1956.



Board of Managers.so Two leaders of the movement, John J. Sullivan and John J. Kennelly, both identified by our procedures as local ethnic elites, were in later years nominated to the board though their effort in 1961 failed. The president elected in 1961, R. Newton Rooks, a member of the outside elite and a partner in one of Chicago's larger law firms-Hackert, Rooks, Pitts, Fullager, and Poust-which had steel and railroad industries as typical clients, stood in sharp contrast to the leaders of the opposition, the first an assistant corporate counsel to the City of Chicago, the other a personal injury plaintiff's attorney. Professional interests as well as status-class distinctions had become visible sources of division within the association. Dissatis- faction with the efforts of the bar leadership to balance corporate interests against the needs of the plaintiff bar threatened the CBA's claim of representing a unified profession. The 1961 movement can further be interpreted as an initiative by the plaintiff bar to gain some control over that portion of the local professional project most salient to their work as lawyers-the court system and judicial selection, the topics of the following section-and to obtain from the organized bar the same level of status other successful lawyers had claimed for years. The strength of the Daley machine with consolidated power at the municipal, state, and federal levels undoubtedly encouraged local ethnic lawyers to believe that claims for professional offices and status had a better chance of being recognized in this new political environment than they had earlier.

3. Judicial Politics The preceding two sections have established the importance of the courts

as instruments used by the association in pursuit of its various local projects. The courts had been used early and successfully to create a broad occupational domain for lawyers but used in later years not as successfully to regulate the behavior of personal injury plaintiff lawyers. Local party politics ex- acerbated by status-class politics was evident in the debates over the selection and retention of judges, important aspects of the legal profession's project.

The judicial project of the CBA was carried out by the Board of Managers and two important committees, the Committee on Candidates for Election, which screened judicial candidates for suitability, and the Committee on the Judiciary, which evaluated the performance of sitting judges. In addition to the regular activities of these two committees, CBA leaders were involved in the debates and compromises that surrounded the 1964 Illinois Judicial Arti- cle as well as later attempts to amend that article.

CBA involvement in judicial politics began almost with the inception of the association. At a meeting of the CBA in 1886, future CBA president James L. High remarked: "The vicious system of an elective judiciary and the unseem- ly scramble among lawyers for every vacant judicial position are among the surest signs of the decadence of the professional spirit."8'

80. Kogan, supra note 50, at 247-49. 81. Id. at 63.



Throughout the 1950s, the CBA joined other groups to update the judicial article of the Illinois Constitution. Important as the technical reforms were that integrated all judicial forums into a three-tiered system and placed in the supreme court greater power to establish rules governing the judicial system, the central issue was the method of selecting judges. The local Democratic party favored the election of judges; most CBA leaders favored appointment. By 1961, a compromise amendment was drafted. Given the momentum for major judicial reform, the compromise was a victory for the Cook County Democrats. The movement for the merit selection of judges was defeated; judges would continue to be elected in partisan elections and once elected would be retained in office unless 600% of the electorate opposed their retention. The amendment was passed in 1962 and went into effect in 1964.

During the period from 1950 to 1974 a transformation in CBA judicial politics occurred. Events during that time have been described as continued efforts by the organized bar to upgrade the quality of the judiciary and to mod- ernize the organization of the courts.82 We will see that status-class politics helps as well to interpret some of the events surrounding and following this period of judicial reform. To trace this transformation, we looked to the board members' pattern of membership on the Candidates and Judiciary committees.

The data presented in table 7 show increased participation by local ethnic board members on the Judiciary and Candidates committees of the CBA after 1962. Before 1962, 11 (23%) of the 47 board members who had served on those judicial committees were local ethnic elites, slightly fewer than the number one would expect if there were no association between status-class membership and judicial committee service. (Because the 56 board members classed as local ethnic are 27% of the total 207 board members, a proportion- al ethnic representation on the judicial committees would be 27% of the total board members serving on the committees: 27% of 47 = 12.7.) Local aristocrats accounted for the greatest proportion (45 %7o) of the board members who had served on these committees before 1962, but there appears to be no substantial bias in membership patterns. However, after 1962, some systematic bias does appear. Board members of the local ethnic status class were more likely than their counterparts to serve on these two judicial committees. This is reflected in relative as well as absolute numbers; they were members of the committees in larger numbers than their numerical presence within the elite could explain. After 1962, local ethnic board members accounted for the greatest proportion of board members to serve on the judicial committees, 42%, compared to 29% for each of the other classes. The general compositional transformation we have documented for the Board of Managers seems to apply to the important Candidates and Judiciary committees as well. The increased participation of local ethnic elites came at the expense of local

82. Id. at 227-78; Terence Charles Halliday, Parameters of Professional Influence: Policies and Politics of the Chicago Bar Association, 1945-70, at 220-42, 284-91 (Ph.D. Diss., University of Chicago, 1979).



aristocratic board members. The findings suggest that controlling the CBA'S

judicial project was an objective of the local ethnic lawyers. Did the changes in membership proportions on the CBA Judiciary and Can-

didates committees have any subsequent effect on the judicial policies of the CBA? We are able to answer this question indirectly by noting the changes in the types of evaluations rendered by the CBA. Evidence exists that this numerical influence was translated into substantive judicial politics. For instance, in 1951, of the 120 candidates for seats on the circuit court bench, 72 (60%) received the CBA'S endorsement. In 1968, 145 of 192 (760%) received endorsement.83 Furthermore, the CBA was less critical than the Chicago Council of Lawyers in their evaluations. In the 1970 judicial elections for 25 seats on the appellate bench, the CBA found all candidates qualified, but the CCL found only two qualified."4 Recall that the very formation of the Chicago Council of Lawyers involved elements of status-class and judicial politics. A more systematic comparison of changes in the evaluations made by the CBA before and after the 1964 judicial reform shows a general reduction after 1964 in the

TABLE 7 Involvement of Status Classes in Committees Related to Judicial Politics, CBA Board of Managers, 1950-74

Local Outside Ethnics Aristocrats Elites Total

Not a member fobserv. 45.0 60.0 55.0 160

Membership f expect. 43.4 62.6 54.1 on judicial or fo -fe 1.6 - 2.6 0.9 candidates committee Member before 1962 f observ. 11.0 21.0 15.0 47

fexpect. 12.7 18.4 15.9 fo-fe -1.7 2.6 -0.9

Total 56.0 81.0 70.0 207

X2 = 0.343 with 2 d.f. p = .656

Local Outside Ethnics Aristocrats Elites Total

Not a member f observ. 37.0 68.0 57.0 162

Membership f expect. 43.9 63.4 54.8 on judicial or fo -fe - 6.9 4.6 2.2 candidates committee Member after 1962 fobserv. 19.0 13.0 13.0 45

f expect. 12.2 17.6 15.2 fo-fe 6.8 -4.6 -2.2

Total 56.0 81.0 70.0 207

X2 = 6.845 with 2 d.f. p= .033

83. Halliday, supra note 82, at 228. 84. Powell, supra note 35, at 539.



percentage of candidates named unqualified, the most dramatic changes oc- curring in the evaluations of Republican candidates."5 The strength of the Democratic machine in Chicago and the infusion of the local ethnic elites in- to positions of authority over the judicial activities of the CBA apparently led to more even-handed evaluations if not more critical ones. Now that we have verified that there were changes in the CBA's judicial project that accompanied the changes in status-class composition of the leadership cadre, we can ask whether these changes, coupled with the formal judicial reform itself, led to any changes in the composition of the Cook County judiciary.

Fortunately, the state and municipal judiciaries have been studied during this period. Consider the following description of composition of the Chica- go area judiciary in the context of the status classes we have delineated:

Of eighty judges elected to the position of circuit court or associate circuit court judge from 1960 to 1968, at least seventy-three were active in ward or township organizations.

In 1970, at least twenty-five of sixty-six circuit court judges were Irish, six of the twelve appellate court judges in Cook County were Irish, one of the three Illinois Supreme Court Justices was Irish, and three out of ten of the members of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit were Irish.86

Of the county judiciary in 1970 "almost one-half the judges had gone to either Loyola or DePaul. . . . Chicago, Northwestern, Harvard, and Yale . . . together provided only about one-fourth the judges on the circuit court bench.""' Skogan's study of the Cook County judiciary showed that after judicial reform, the Chicago area judicial candidates were more likely than before the reform to have attended DePaul, Loyola, Kent, or John Marshall law schools and to have been born and educated through high school locally; and while Republicans after the reform nominated judicial candidates who scored slightly higher on Skogan's ethnic status scale, city Democrats nominated candidates who scored substantially lower."8 Thus six to eight years after judicial reform began, and during a period when a segment of the CBA top leadership continued to criticize the methods of selection, the machine politics of the Daley era persisted in influencing the composition of the judiciary.

We suggest that in part this persistence resulted from a change in CBA leadership, specifically from the increased number of local ethnic lawyers, hardly alienated from machine politics, who gained influence in the committees directly involved with the evaluation of the judiciary. The active and publicly visible campaigning that was done during this period by those CBA leaders

85. Wesley G. Skogan, The Politics of Judicial Reform: Cook County, Illinois, Jus. Sys. J., Sept. 1975, at 11, 19 table 2.

86. Milton L. Rakove, Don't Make No Waves-Don't Back No Losers: An Insider's Analysis of the Daley Machine 225, 227 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975).

87. Id. at 228. 88. Skogan, supra note 85, at 18 & table 1.



who were alienated from local politics was accompanied, and perhaps was generated, by a quieter transformation of greater consequence: the realiza- tion of part of the local ethnic elite's professional project.

Membership in the CBA did not determine a lawyer's position in the debate over the selection and retention of judges; both factions in the debate had representatives within the CBA elite. The historical record shows, furthermore, that at least one attempt was made by the CBA leadership to reconcile some of the differences between the political factions on the eve of the voting for the Judicial Article.

At one such "harmony dinner" in the Association's headquarters only three weeks before the November election at which the amendment was to be voted on, a momentary jolt was administered by Mayor Daley after Hayes Robert- son-Cook County Republican chairman and one of several speakers including Gov. Otto Kerner and William G. Lynch, the Mayor's former law partner-made a reference to "political bosses" and left hurriedly, presumably to avoid being photographed with Daley. Called on to speak, Daley assailed Robertson as a "faker" and added, "All you fakers can leave together!" When five men left, Daley cried, "Certainly it's easy for these fakers to leave, because none of them are sincere about judicial reform!"'9

The CBA, perhaps because its own membership had been politicized by the debate, apparently was not able to heal the divisions within the larger polity. The incident gives further evidence that the proposed and eventually enacted amendment was not acceptable to many of the political leaders who were opposed to the local Democratic machine.

In 1970, a few CBA leaders, some of whom were members of the local aristocrat and outside elite status classes, helped to place Proposition 2B on a separate ballot, not as part of the proposed new constitution. Proposition 2B called for "merit selection" and would have given to a committee appointed by the governor the power to appoint judges. The responses of Republican and Democratic party officials were similar: too much influence would be given to the bar in selecting judges. The proposition failed to pass, and Il- linois was left with an electoral system of judicial selection and the retention ballot.90

In 1972, public debate between CBA leaders resumed. Frank Greenberg, president of the CBA in 1969 and one outspoken member of the local ethnic elite to oppose the method of retaining sitting judges, argued that retention election without merit selection was in effect giving life terms to elected judges. Philip Corboy, also a member of the local ethnic elite and president of the CBA in 1972, disagreed with Greenberg publicly. He argued that the retention ballot had increased the autonomy of the judiciary by eliminating the involvement in partisan politics necessary when judges must campaign for reelection.9' Factions persisted and debate continued, but influence had

89. Kogan, supra note 50, at 244. 90. Id. at 265-69. 91. Id. at 295-301.



shifted within the CBA to the local ethnic elites who supported the new procedures of judicial selection and retention.

IV. CONCLUSIONS

Our review of the composition and policies of the CBA leadership over a 25-year period described areas of success as well as failure in the pursuit of the CBA's professional project. Larson's and Auerbach's important commentaries on the legal profession have been in part substantiated and in part modified.92 The CBA successfully integrated the varied interests of a segmented bar. Local ethnic lawyers increased their influence largely at the expense of the outside elite lawyers. The presence on the Board of Managers of lawyers from different status classes was not mere tokenism nor instances of co-optation, for the different status classes pursued different projects within the CBA. We noted how the local ethnic members of the elite were involved in efforts to reverse the antagonistic policies directed against personal injury plaintiff's lawyers by outside educational elite board members. Local ethnic lawyers also increased their influence in the CBA's judicial project.

The cycles of status-class participation coincided with the trends in local, state, and national politics. Rather than the CBA evolving into a quasi-political party, a shadow Republican party in the one-party politics of Chicago, the composition of the CBA leadership seemed to coincide with the elected local, state, and federal leadership. The exact reasons for this coincidence remain unclear. Perhaps the emergence of local ethnic elites was a result of a successful translation of local political power into influence within the government of the profession, or perhaps the CBA wanted to minimize the fric- tion between itself and elected or appointed government officials in their many policy discussions.

We have seen that each status class, once it attained membership on the board, pursued its specialized interests-what we termed "local projects." We suggested that the more global project of establishing the neutrality of the lawyer's role in society was threatened by the efforts of outside elite and local aristocratic lawyers to legislate against certain practices of the personal injury plaintiff bar. An accommodation with this portion of the bar was made during the 1960s, however, and a division of the bar along these lines was avoided. We further observed that the CBA committees controlling the judicial project increasingly came to be influenced by the local ethnic elite members within the board.

Yet not all segments of the bar in Chicago were integrated into the CBA polity. Young lawyers from elite law schools and large firms, apparently more reform minded than most of the leaders of the CBA, successfully formed a "counter-bar" association to challenge the policies of the CBA, most notably in the area of judicial politics.

Auerbach's characterizations of the organized bar during the modern pe-

92. For a critique of several theses advanced by Auerbach and Larson, see Terence C. Halliday, Profes- sions, Class and Capitalism, 24 Archives EuropCenes de Sociologie/Eur. J. Soc. 321 (1983).


No. 2 PROFESSIONAL PROJECTS OF ELITE LAYWERS 339

riod are partly substantiated and partly refuted by our study of a local legal elite. We have obtained clear evidence of the central importance of a group representing the long-standing establishment elite described by Auerbach. But in addition to the local aristocrats within the CBA leadership cadre, we found two distinctive status classes, one having emerged from the local ethnic bar, another whose disparity was in their nonlocal origin and nonlocal elite legal education. These findings led to our conclusion that the exclusion- ary policies of the organized bar criticized by Auerbach were attenuated in Chicago during the 1960s. The nearly total hegemony of the local aristocrats and outside elites in the earlier periods was undermined but not completely overcome. Whether the successes of the local ethnic bar in attaining leadership positions and in implementing their local projects are to become the order of things is another question. But in any case, Auerbach's generalizations that a consolidated and homogeneous legal elite first excluded and later co-opted other segments of the practicing bar need to be read with this local exception in mind.

At a more abstract and structural level the findings support Auerbach's implied theory of the circulation of legal elites, a process generated by the development of resources and opportunities in the broader legal and political systems and catalyzed by the local social and cultural milieu in which the profession is embedded. Each of the three status classes identified within the CBA

leadership cadre represents segments within the bar created by successive waves of transformations to the legal system. Outside elites emerged on the basis of their elite educational attainments and technical expertise and the ex- pansion of large and medium-sized law firms; local aristocrats, on the basis of their high and consolidated status and class endowments; local ethnics, on the basis of achieved positions of influence in the local and ethnically organized political and legal systems.

The compositional transformation of the CBA leadership was accompanied by policy shifts of the organized bar and, therefore, represents more than the long-awaited and symbolic status recognition sought by the more successful practitioners of the ethnic and litigating bar. Furthermore, we think that this changing composition of the CBA is an ongoing process representing the continuing struggles of a segmented bar with divided interests and local professional objectives. In reflecting upon the professional politics we have described, we are not concluding that the public interest will always have its advocates within the decision-making process of the organized bar. In fact, we found little day-to-day evidence of such advocacy. There is some probability, however, that with a segmented leadership, parochial policies pursued by any one status class will not go unchecked.

We have characterized the politics of the CBA as a series of local professional projects. The problems associated with integrating a segmented bar, with merging particular local projects into policies pursued by the bar as a whole through the association, with establishing and maintaining control over the political bases upon which the lawyer depends have not disappeared nor diminished. But the CBA is one example of how bar associations have co-



ordinated the local professional projects of diverse practitioners, an example that attests to the internal political strength of the profession, not its weak- ness.


Documents

Professional Projects of Elite Chicago Lawyers, 1950–1974