Let’s take a look at the history of lawyers and the lawyer profession. The origins of lawyers and the first founders of law make their appearance in Ancient Greece and Rome.
This article details the history of banking in the United States. Banking in the United States is regulated by both the federal and state governments. In the first half of the 19th century, many of the smaller commercial banks within New England were easily chartered as laws allowed to do so (primarily due to open franchise laws).
By 1890, there were 20 state bar associations, 40 by 1900, and 48 by 1916. By 1890, the number had increased to 159 bar at the local level, and over 1,100 by 1930.
The Banking Act of 1935 strengthened the powers of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in the area of credit management, tightened existing restrictions on banks engaging in certain activities, and enlarged the supervisory powers of the FDIC.
These banks were closely regulated. They had to keep one-third of their paid-in capital in federal bonds and deposit these bonds with the Treasury, converting millions in bank capital into cash to finance the war. The bonds also served as security for a new national currency.
State banks are financial institutions chartered by a state to provide commercial banking services. Unlike the Federal Reserve, they are not responsible for monetary policy and are restricted to providing banking and, in some cases, wealth management and insurance services.
The BUS prompted state legislatures to charter more banks—there were about thirty of these by 1800, more than 100 by 1810, 500–600 by the 1830s, and 1500–1600 on the eve of the Civil War. These banks were corporations, and the states also chartered many non-bank business corporations.
The Bank acted as the federal government's fiscal agent, collecting tax revenues, securing the government's funds, making loans to the government, transferring government deposits through the bank's branch network, and paying the government's bills.
It helped fund the public debt left from the American Revolution, facilitated the issuance of a stable national currency, and provided a convenient means of exchange for all the people of the United States.
The Act had three primary purposes: (1) create a system of national banks, (2) to create a uniform national currency, and (3) to create an active secondary market for Treasury securities to help finance the Civil War (for the Union's side).
Merchant Banks Come Into Power Originally, they relied heavily on commissions from foreign bond sales from Europe, with a small backflow of American bonds trading in Europe. This allowed them to build capital.
Modern banking in India originated in the mid of 18th century. Among the first banks were the Bank of Hindustan, which was established in 1770 and liquidated in 1829–32; and the General Bank of India, established in 1786 but failed in 1791.
Usually several people got together, pooled their money and opened the bank. Usually a company was organized on the basis of a small cash subscription, with paper money supplying the deficit of metallic currency. And most of the banks' loans were “frozen assets,” long term loans for the land or seed.
The Bank of the United States was first chartered by the US Congress on February 25, 1791 after being proposed by Alexander Hamilton (Secretary of the Treasury) in 1790. The purpose for the bank was to handle the financial needs and requirments of the new central government of the newly formed United States.
Hamilton's debt program was a remarkable success. By demonstrating Americans' willingness to repay their debts, he made the United States attractive to foreign investors. European investment capital poured into the new nation in large amounts.
Members of the Federalist Party encouraged President George Washington to establish a national bank that would control the amount of money that the government issued. A stable currency would allow business to occur and help the new country to grow.
In the first half of the 19th century, Mexico set up a judicial system for its northernmost districts, in present-day New Mexico and California. There were no professionally trained lawyers or judges. Instead, there were numerous legal roles such as notario, escribano, asesor, auditor de Guerra, justicia mayor, procurador, and juez receptor. With the annexation by the United States in 1848, Congress set up an entirely new territorial legal system, using U.S. laws, forms, and procedures. Practically all the lawyers and judges were new arrivals from the United States, as there was no place in the new system for the original Mexican roles. Elfego Baca (1865 – 1945) was an outlaw-turned-lawman, lawyer, and politician in New Mexico in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1888, after serving as a County Sheriff, Baca became a U.S. Marshal. He served for two years and then began studying law. In December 1894, he was admitted to the bar and practiced law in New Mexico until 1904. he held numerous local political offices, and when New Mexico became a state in 1912, he was the unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress. In the late 1950s, Walt Disney turned Baca into the first Hispanic popular culture hero in the United States, on 10 television shows, in six comic books, in a feature film, and in related merchandising. Nevertheless, Disney deliberately avoided ethnic tension by presenting Baca as a generalized Western hero, portraying a standard hero similar to Davy Crockett, in Mexican dress.
Local bar associations before 1870 were basically social groups, which took little or no responsibility for maintaining the quality of admissions or performance by the membership. In 1870, leading lawyers in Manhattan organized the "Association of the Bar of the City of New York" to battle the notorious political corruption of the Tweed machine. The bar quickly emerged as a powerful organization and a model to others; in the 1870s, eight cities and eight statewide associations were in operation. By 1890, there were 20 state bar associations, 40 by 1900, and 48 by 1916. By 1890, the number had increased to 159 bar at the local level, and over 1,100 by 1930. They still performed social functions, but were increasingly called upon to organize, discipline, and professionalize lawyers, while fighting off the long-standing hostility and ridicule prevalent toward the legal profession. An important priority for the states and for the national American Bar Association was to maintain control over state bar examinations and over requirements for law schools, such as academic curriculum, library facilities, and availability of full-time faculty.
Court proceedings were informal, for the judges and no more training than the attorneys. By the 1760s, the situation had dramatically changed. Lawyers were essential to the rapidly growing international trade, dealing with questions of partnerships, contracts, and insurance. The sums of money involved were large, and hiring an incompetent lawyer was a very expensive proposition. Lawyers were now professionally trained, and conversant in an extremely complex language that combined highly specific legal terms and motions with a dose of Latin. Court proceedings became a baffling mystery to the ordinary layperson. Lawyers became more specialized and built their fee schedule on the basis of their reputation for success. As their status, wealth, and power rose, animosity followed.
History of the American legal profession. The History of the American legal profession covers the work, training, and professional activities of lawyers from the colonial era to the present. Lawyers grew increasingly powerful in the colonial era as experts in the English common law, which was adopted by the colonies.
Roscoe Pound says flatly, "Lawyers as a class were very unpopular in the colonies. ". Lawyers thus tried to raise their professional standards by forming local bar associations, but had little success in the colonial era. Full professionalization would not become standardized until after the Civil War.
Lawyers and politics. The British governors were upper class aristocrats not trained in the law, and felt und uly constrained by the legalistic demands of U.S. lawyers. From the 1680s to 1715, numerous efforts were made to strengthen Royal control and diminish legal constraints over the power of the governors.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, most young people became lawyers by apprenticing in the office of an established lawyer, where they would engage in clerical duties such as drawing up routine contracts and wills, while studying standard treatises. The apprentice would then have to be admitted to the local court in order to practice law. Frank B. Kellogg (1856-1937) is an unusually successful example of this route. Starting as a farm boy in Minnesota who dropped out of the local one-room school at age 14, he never attended high school, college, or law school. He clerked for a lawyer who specialized in corporate law, and soon proved himself adept. He played a major role as special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General in one of the most famous decisions in corporate legal history, in which the Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil Corporation in 1911. His professional colleagues elected Kellogg president of the American Bar Association in 1912. After one term in the United States Senate, he became a diplomat as ambassador to Great Britain and as Secretary of State in 1925–29. He co-authored the world-famous Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize. The pact was signed by nearly all nations recognized at the time. It outlawed making war, and provided the legal foundation for the trial and execution of German and Japanese war criminals at the end of World War II.
When the collapse of the Knickerbocker Trust sets off a chain of failures of the less-regulated trust industry in autumn 1907, cash dries up and called loans threaten to topple the U.S. financial system.
ABA establishes a section for state banks, with more than 8,000 initial members. 1917: Patriotic Banking. With the entry of the United States into World War I, Federal Reserve policy shifts to support war borrowing. ABA supports the Liberty Loan campaigns of World War I.
1915: Advocating for National Banks. At the 1915 Annual Convention, ABA creates a section for national banks. In 1919, ABA—still headquartered in New York—will open its first Washington office to help advocate on behalf of national banks. 1916: Fueling a Farm Bust.
1911: Routing toward Progress. ABA institutes its routing number system providing a unique numeric identifier for each bank in the country. It is quickly adopted nationwide and streamlines the clearing and settlement of checks. 1911: The Check Is in the Mail.
ABA Investments. 1900: The Growth of Professional Development. The American Institute of Bank Clerks—forerunner of ABA’s American Institute of Banking, which will exist until 2014—is launched to unite bank employees for education and social purposes. The institute offers a series of correspondence courses and courses administered ...
1919: Growing Industry. National City Bank of New York—now Citibank—becomes the first bank to reach $1 billion in assets. 1920: Bankers Teaching Economics. ABA creates a committee to promote teaching of economics and banking in public schools.
1918: Creation of Fedwire. The Federal Reserve launches Fedwire, a real-time gross settlement funds credit transfer network. 1919: Banking on the Edge. Congress passes the Edge Act, allowing banks to establish offices across state lines to engage in international banking and assist in foreign trade transactions.
As the legal profession continued to evolve and become more official in ancient Rome it also became highly regulated. There were many rules around being lawyers that controlled how much a lawyer could charge, where they could plead a case, and how they could become registered with the court or bar. Before this time, any ordinary citizen could call themselves an advocate (lawyer) but once the profession became more regulated, there was a very high standard to meet before being allowed to work as a lawyer, and the profession became only accessible to the higher classes. A matter of fact, Rome developed a class of specialists known as jurisconsults who were wealthy amateurs who dabbled in law as an intellectual hobby. Advocates and ordinary people went to jurisconsults for legal advice.
Some aspiring lawyers choose an LB or LLB as their undergraduate degree while others choose something different. In any case, it’s important to connect to the history of the legal profession, how it developed over time and how that history impacts the rules and customs accepted in today’s legal profession. May 8th, 2018.
In Massachusetts, there was no special training required to be a lawyer until 1761 when the bar formed an association and required that lawyers have seven years training before they could practice law. The bar also established professional ethics that all lawyers were required to follow.
Legal Profession In The Middle Ages. Lawyers in medieval times found themselves struggling to make a living as the legal profession collapsed in the western world. But the profession did have a resurgence eventually but mostly in a form that served the church and its laws.
In ancient Athens “orators” would often plead the case of a “friend” because at the time it was required that an individual plead their own case or have an ordinary citizen or friend plead their case on their behalf. Also, these ancient lawyers were not allowed to take a fee for their service.
It’s interesting to note that ancient lawyers in the middle ages developed quite a negative reputation because there was excessive litigation during that time which was caused by a large number of lawyers who created extra litigation due to their incompetence or misconduct.
The bar also established professional ethics that all lawyers were required to follow. Eventually, the prejudices against lawyers started to fall away and the legal profession began to gain respect and power. Twenty-five of the fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence were lawyers.
Its 18 branches, especially those on the southern and western frontiers, support American expansion by overissuing banknotes beyond their specie reserves. Boston’s Suffolk Bank is founded and serves as an early clearinghouse and de facto central bank for New England.
The first mutually owned savings banks in the United States—the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society and Boston’s Provident Institution for Savings—are chartered. Similar institutions follow in New York, Baltimore, Providence, R.I., and Hartford, Conn.
Specie payments are suspended. 1829 : Pioneering Deposit Insurance. The New York Safety Fund is founded as one of the first state-based deposit insurance schemes. The voluntary fund will be overcome by losses in the Panic of 1837 and close its doors for good in the 1860s. 1831: America’s First Thrift.
The Panic of 1837 begins when banks in New York suspend specie payments, triggering a seven-year recession and the failure of 40 percent of America’s banks. 1838: Uncharted Territory.
1831: America’s First Thrift. America’s first building and loan —the Oxford Provident Building Association—opens in Frankford, Pa., to make home loans more accessible. 1833: The Return of Free Banking.
The Second Oxford Provident, Frankford, Pa., becomes the first building and loan association to admit women as members. The first issue of Thompson’s Bank Note Reporter published. The newspaper evaluates good and bad banks and the notes they issue in order to better inform the public.
The informal system, which persisted until 1858, limited bank failures among participating banks. The Second Bank of the United States seeks to curtail its inflationary activity, which, combined with a collapse in U.S. agricultural prices, triggers America’s first peacetime financial panic.
The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ( FDIC ), which implemented regulation of deposit interest rates, and separated commercial from investment banking. The Banking Act of 1935 served to strengthen and give the Federal Reserve more centralized power. 5 .
1  2  The regulation was motivated, on the one hand, by the need for increased centralized control to maintain stability in finance and, by extension, the overall economy. While on the other hand, it was motivated by the fear of too much control being concentrated in too few hands.
Although the newly established Federal Reserve helped to improve the nation’s payments system and created a more flexible currency, it's a misunderstanding of the financial crisis following the 1929 stock market crash served to roil the nation in a severe economic crisis that would come to be known as the Great Depression. The Depression would lead to even more banking regulation instituted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the provisions under the New Deal. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ( FDIC ), which implemented regulation of deposit interest rates, and separated commercial from investment banking. The Banking Act of 1935 served to strengthen and give the Federal Reserve more centralized power. 5 
The free banking era, characterized as it was by a complete lack of federal control and regulation, would come to an end with the National Banking Act of 1863 (and its later revisions in 1864 and 1865), which aimed to replace the old state banks with nationally chartered ones. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ( OCC) was created to issue these new bank charters as well as oversee that national banks maintained the requirement to back all note issuance with holdings of U.S. government securities. 2 
The period following the New Deal banking reforms up until around 1980 experienced a relative degree of banking stability and economic expansion. Still, it has been recognized that the regulation has also served to make American banks far less innovative and competitive than they had previously been. The heavily regulated commercial banks had been losing increasing market share to less-regulated and innovative financial institutions. For this reason, a wave of deregulation occurred throughout the last two decades of the twentieth century.
Consequently, under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was approved to wrest control of the nation’s finances from banks while at the same time creating a mechanism that would enable a more elastic currency and greater supervision over the nation’s banking infrastructure. 4 .
While the new national banking system helped return the country to a more uniform and secure currency that it had not experienced since the years of the First and Second Banks, it was ultimately at the expense of an elastic currency that could expand and contract according to commercial and industrial needs . The growing complexity of the U.S. economy highlighted the inadequacy of an inelastic currency, which led to frequent financial panics occurring throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.
A major breakthrough for lawyers occurred in the 17th century. Blackstone the Magician, on a trip through Rome, unearthed several dozen ancient Roman legal texts. This new knowledge spread through the legal community like the black plague. Up until that point, lawyers used the local language of the community for their work. Since many smart non-lawyers could then determine what work, if any, the lawyer had done, lawyers often lost clients, and sometimes their head.
Using Blackstone's finds, lawyers could use Latin to hide what they did so that only other lawyers understood what was happening in any lawsuit. Blackstone was a hero to all lawyers until, of course, he was sued for copyright infringement by another lawyer.
(In fact, there are over 750,000 lawyers in this country.) Every facet of life today is controlled by lawyers. Even Dan Quayle (a lawyer) claims, surprise, that there are too many lawyers. Yet until limits are imposed on legal birth control, the number of lawyers will continue to increase. Is there any hope? We don't know and frankly don't care since the author of this book is a successful, wealthy lawyer, the publishers of this book are lawyers, the cashier at the bookstore is a law student, and your mailman is a lawyer. So instead of complaining, join us and remember, there is no such thing as a one-lawyer town.
The explosion in the number of lawyers coincided with the development of algebra, the mathematics of legal billing. Pythagoras, a famous Greek lawyer, is revered for his Pythagorean Theorem, which proved the mathematical quandary of double billing. This new development allowed lawyers to become wealthy members of their community, as well as to enter politics, an area previously off-limits to lawyers. Despite the mathematical soundness of double billing, some lawyers went to extremes. Julius Caesar, a Roman lawyer and politician, was murdered by several clients for his record hours billed in late February and early March of 44 B.C. (His murder was the subject of a play by lawyer William Shakespeare. When Caesar discovered that one of his murderers was his law partner Brutus, he murmured the immortal lines, "Et tu Brute," which can be loosely translated from Latin as "my estate keeps twice the billings.")
Greece and Rome saw the revival of the lawyer in society. Lawyers were again allowed to freely practice, and they took full advantage of this opportunity. Many records exist from this classic period. Legal cases ranged from run-of-the-mill goat contract cases to the well-known product liability case documented in the Estate of Socrates vs. Hemlock Wine Company. (See Wilson, Phillips ed. Famous Roman Cases. Houghton, Mifflin publishers, 1949.)
The attempted sale of the Sphinx resulted in the Pharaoh issuing a country-wide purge of all lawyers. Many were slaughtered, and the rest wandered in the desert for years looking for a place to practice. Greece and Rome saw the revival of the lawyer in society.
Previously, lawyers had relied on oral bills for collection of payment, which made collection difficult and meant that if a client died before payment (with life expectancy between 25 and 30 and the death penalty for all cases, most clients died shortly after their case was resolved), the bill would remain uncollected.
They organize Wells, Fargo & Co., which offers banking services, shipment of specie and bullion and overland mail services. Wells Fargo represents the banking industry’s commitment to making sure customers’ funds go where they want them, when they want them. 1861: The Civil War Begins.
The U.S. League of Local Building and Loan Associations —the oldest predecessor to America’s Community Bankers—is founded in Chicago. 1894: Pinkertons on the Case. ABA hires the nationally renowned Pinkerton National Detective Agency to keep track of professional criminals and forewarn members of their movements.
Upheaval as the Civil War begins results in the suspension of on-demand specie redemption, which will not be resumed until 1879. 1861: Financing American Industry. Jay Cooke founds an eponymous bank in New York that is considered America’s first investment bank.
1879: Specie Payment Resumes. In ABA’s first policy victory, the gold standard returns.
ABA’s promise to pursue those who robbed member banks reduces robberies dramatically —in 1896 and 1897, the only successful robbery of a member is of a Yonkers, N.Y., bank that had placed its ABA membership sign in an inconspicuous spot where the robbers could not see it. 1891: The U.S. League Is Founded.
Chain banking—the development of banks owned by one chain or common owner—begins to develop, particularly in the Midwest, West, and South. Branching reduces bank failure rates as serving multiple regions or towns makes banks more resilient to isolated downturns. 1899: Checking with Certainty.
The Boston Clearinghouse begins a uniform clearing procedure for clearing checks of all New England banks. The Boston breakthrough is repeated in St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit and New York—becoming a model for the future Federal Reserve System. 1899: Credit Analysis.