America's Lawyer-Presidents: From Law Office to Oval Office |
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Of America's forty-three presidents, twenty-five have been lawyers. John Adams, the first lawyer-president, handled prominent political cases during his twenty-year law practice and made significant contributions to our nation's founding charters. His son, John Quincy Adams, argued landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases both before and after his presidency. He was one of eight lawyer-presidents to appear as counsel before the highest court in the land. America's most beloved and admired president, Abraham Lincoln, was involved in more than five thousand cases during his 25-year legal career, while Rutherford Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and other lawyer-presidents gained fame handling sensational murder trials and high profile cases.
America's Lawyer-Presidents sheds light on the legal backgrounds of each of these chief executives and describes how their experiences as lawyers impacted and shaped their presidencies. Written by historians and presidential scholars and highlighted by photos, illustrations, and sidebars, America's Lawyer-Presidents provides new insights into our national leaders and their lives and times, from colonial days to the present.
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"Twenty-five of the United States' forty-three presidents have been lawyers, and yet their careers as attorneys have tended to receive scant attention when compared to their political lives, even though the training and activity of these men as lawyers often contributed deeply to their views on American institutions. America's Lawyer-Presidents, which is the work of an impressive assembly of respected scholars, is lucid, informative, and highly engaging. The book provides intriguing biographical perspectives on the professional lives of a number of our most influential citizens, and also demonstrates yet again the profound relationship between the development of American law and our democracy."
Scott Turow
"[T]his volume provides useful essays on each of Americas 25 lawyer presidents, among them Jefferson, both Adamses, Monroe, Lincoln, McKinley, Taft, Wilson, FDR, Nixon and Clinton. Contributors, including such scholars as Paul Finkelman, Lawrence Friedman and Lewis L. Gould, focus on how legal training prepared these men for their tenure as chief executive and influenced their conduct in office. These themes derive quite directly, as Gross writes, from Edmund Burke's view that no other profession is more closely connected with actual life as the law. It concerns the highest of all temporal interests... property, reputation, the peace of all families, liberty, life even, and the very foundations of society¿. As this profusely illustrated volume demonstrates, each man was unique in what he brought to the law, what he took from the law and the extent to which he allowed his legal training to influence and inform executive policy."
Publishers Weekly
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