As a young lawyer, Darrow had been impressed by the book Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims by John Peter Altgeld. The two men became close friends and shared a belief that the United States criminal system favoured the rich over the poor.
Full Answer
Criminal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow is seen outside the White House in Washington, D.C., in this 1927 photo. Though best known for his role in the Scopes monkey trial, Darrow argued before the Supreme Court that the government's conspiracy and treason laws were unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment.
Clarence Darrow became the most famous defense lawyer in early 20th century America by taking on cases considered hopeless and emerging as a leading voice for civil liberties.
At various times Darrow was a law partner of Altgeld and of the poet Edgar Lee Masters. His courtroom pleas were filled with allusions based on his wide reading. In his speeches and writings he advocated the closed shop and unrestricted freedom of expression and opposed capital punishment, Prohibition, protective tariffs, and the League of Nations.
Darrow attended law school for only one year before being admitted to the Ohio bar in 1878. He moved to Chicago in 1887 and immediately took part in attempts to free the anarchists charged with murder in the Haymarket Riot (May 4, 1886).
criminal lawyerFrom labor lawyer to criminal lawyer This effectively put Darrow out of business as a labor lawyer, and he switched to civil and criminal cases.
Darrow's goal in getting involved was to debunk fundamentalist Christianity and raise awareness of a narrow, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. It was the only time in his career he offered to give free legal aid. Bryan and Darrow set the tone by immediately attacking each other in the press.
His career as a union lawyer came to an end and he became a criminal defense lawyer." By the 1920s Darrow was back on top as the most famous trial attorney in America, a persuasive speaker who earned up to a quarter million dollars a case. But it wasn't the law that excited him — it was the great contest over ideas.
Allegheny CollegeUniversity of Michigan Law SchoolUniversity of MichiganClarence Darrow/Education
- An American lawyer, a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a prominent advocate for Georgist (economic value derived from land (including natural resources and natural opportunities) should belong equally to all members of society).
Darrow's main supporters: Secular thinkers, moderate protestants, liberal thinkers.
The name Darrow is boy's name of English origin meaning "spear". A family of lawyers might be interested in this surname as a tribute to famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow.
He had been pressured to implicate the labor leaders by the prosecutors in the case. Darrow gave a summation which amounted to a profound defense of the labor movement. Haywood and the others were acquitted, and Darrow's performance cemented his position as a defender of the common man against money interests.
Early Life. Clarence Darrow was born April 18, 1857, in Farmdale, Ohio. After attending public schools in Ohio, young Darrow worked as a farm hand and decided the labor of the farm was not for him. He studied for a year Allegheny College in Pennsylvania before attending the University of Michigan law school for a year.
Besides his busy legal practice, Darrow published a number of books, including Crime: Its Cause and Treatment, published in 1922, dealing with Darrow's belief that crime was caused by factors impacting a person's life. He also wrote an autobiography published in 1932.
The appeal for mercy posed by Darrow eventually succeeded. After deliberating for ten days, the judge sentenced Leopold and Loeb to sentences of life plus 99 years. (Loeb was killed in prison by another inmate in 1934. Leopold was eventually paroled in 1958 and died in Puerto Rico in 1971.)
The legal result of the trial was actually a loss for Darrow’s client. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. However, to many observers, including H.L. Mencken, Darrow was considered to have won a victory in the sense of having shown to the nation at large the ludicrous nature of fundamentalism.
But when Darrow came into the case, the proceedings became nationally known, and the case was dubbed "The Monkey Trial" in the sensationalist press. A split in American society in the 1920s, between religious conservatives and progressives advocating science, became the focus of the courtroom drama.
Charged with conspiracy to commit murder, Haywood and others were to go on trial in Boise, Idaho. Darrow was retained for the defense and deftly destroyed the prosecution's case. Under Darrow's cross-examination, the actual perpetrator of the bombing admitted he had acted alone as a matter of personal vengeance.
Though best known for his role in the Scopes monkey trial, Darrow argued before the Supreme Court that the government's conspiracy and treason laws were unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment. (AP Photo, reprinted with permission from The Associated Press.) Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) was one of America’s most famous ...
In Darrow’s words, conspiracy was “the modern and ancient drag-net for compassing the imprisonment and death of men whom the ruling class does not like” (1934: 144). Lawyer Clarence Darrow is seen with his wife at his home in Chicago, Ill., on April 18, 1936, one day before his 79th birthday. (AP Photo, used with permission from The Associated ...
Darrow appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, where he argued that Debs and the others had been convicted of doing and advocating what is lawful — organizing support for a union.
Darrow believed that such restrictions were unconstitutional. Of all the threats to freedoms of speech, of the press, and to gather and to petition the government, the most sinister, Darrow thought, was the increasing use of conspiracy laws to combat labor unrest and other forms of dissent.
Once again, the Court disagreed with Darrow, and it upheld Turner’s deportation order. In 1925 Darrow led the defense counsel employed by the American Civil Liberties Union in the Scopes monkey tria l in Dayton, Tennessee.
Clarence Darrow, left, and William Jennings Bryan speak with each other at the "monkey trial" in Dayton, Tenn. in 1925. Darrow was one of three lawyers sent to Dayton by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
During the trial, Darrow subjected William Jennings Bryan, a member of the prosecution, to a withering cross-examination that exposed difficulties with Bryan’s views. Although First Amendment issues were not raised at the time, the Scopes trial has since become a landmark legal symbol.
Clarence Darrow, in full Clarence Seward Darrow, (born April 18, 1857, near Kinsman, Ohio, U.S.—died March 13, 1938, Chicago, Illinois), lawyer whose work as defense counsel in many dramatic criminal trials earned him a place in American legal history. He was also well known as a public speaker, debater, and miscellaneous writer.
Through his friendship with Judge John Peter Altgeld, afterward governor of Illinois, Darrow was appointed Chicago city corporation counsel in 1890, and then he became general attorney for the Chicago and North Western Railway.
William Jennings Bryan (lower left, with fan) and Clarence Darrow (centre right, arms folded) in a Dayton, Tennessee, courtroom during the Scopes Trial, July 1925.
After World War I, Darrow defended several war protesters charged with violating state sedition laws. He saved (1924) Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold from a death sentence (though not from imprisonment) for the murder of 14-year-old Robert Franks in Chicago.
Brandeis had engaged in some ethically questionable behavior as a lawyer, because he sometimes considered himself "counsel to the situation," rather than advocate for a particular client. Marshall was often poorly prepared when he argued cases, even important ones in the Supreme Court.
Douglas, Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan — as well as the two judges for whom I clerked, David Bazelon and Arthur Goldberg.
Despite this oath, the five justices — in complete disregard of their prior decisions and writings — stopped the count in order to ensure the election of a particular person — George W. Bush.
Holmes wrote approvingly of killing "anyone below standard" and "putting to death infants that didn't pass the examination.". In upholding the constitutionality of mandatory sterilization laws, he approved the sterilization of a woman who was mistakenly classified as an "imbecile.".
To the contrary, most surely would have predicted that, on the basis of their prior decisions, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Sandra Day O'Connor would have been the least likely to join such a decision.
Brennan refused to hire women law clerks for many years, and fired a law clerk — at the insistence of Chief Justice Earl Warren — when the clerk's left-wing activities became the subject of critical media reports. I still admire these three justices enormously, even with the knowledge that they weren't perfect.
They may indeed be the tools of revolutionaries and others who work outside the system, and they may perhaps even be justified by a revolutionary means-end calculus. But a lawyer, who does lawyers' work, cannot employ such devices, regardless of the provocation.