Autobiographies of lawyers
Autobiographies of lawyers and associates!
Because of the relative paucity of great works of American legal history (aside from Supreme Court history, long the focus of American legal historians, to the detriment of other equally significant areas of legal history scholarship), generations of lawyers have learned their legal history by reading biographies of great judges and lawyers.
Autobiographies of lawyers
Biography can also play an important role in the formation of professional values by providing role models - and models of what to avoid.
One good place to start is with a biography of Thurgood Marshall, arguably America’s single most influential lawyer, who fought racial discrimination in the South as head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, argued and won Brown v.
Board of Education before the United States Supreme Court, and then served on the Court for several tumultuous decades. The definitive biography of Marshall has not yet been written. Two useful and interesting works, both valuable, are Carl T.
Rowan’s