Lawyers: 87 Years Old & Getting Younger

In 1878 a group of rich Eastern lawyers began meeting in Saratoga Springs "to get the benefit of the waters and to see our friends." Although they called themselves the American Bar Association, for years they stayed so Saratoga-centered that one member recoiled at the very idea of gathering in "faraway" Cleveland. "Why, we'll have a lot of strangers at the meeting," he warned.

Last week the A.B.A.'s 87th annual convention jammed a dozen Manhattan hotels with a lot of strangers, and also three Supreme Court Justices and the President of the U.S. From breakfast to banquet, 7,000 lawyers heard 600 speeches on everything from "Sex and the Single Premium"* to "The Defense of the White-Collar Accused." Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy announced a new Office of Criminal Justice to improve criminal procedures and perhaps soften the Department of Justice's reputation as what he called "The Department of Prosecution."

Important Nonmembers. All this moved one A.B.A. official to announce expansively that "we are truly representative of every lawyer everywhere throughout the length and breadth of the land." The A.B.A. does indeed claim as members almost half the nation's 265,832 licensed lawyers. Its representation ranges from 83% of all lawyers in thinly populated Nevada to only 30% in lawyer-crammed Washington, D.C. There, its nonmembers include three Supreme Court Justices (Black, Douglas, White) and Chief Justice Warren.

Its critics call it inbred, conservative, Southern-dominated. This reputation stems from such instances as the time (1910) when the A.B.A. president decried the "dangerous" doctrine of interpreting the Constitution as "an elastic instrument." Nearly half a century later, A.B.A. orations on the same theme reportedly drove Chief Justice Warren to resign in 1959. In the early 1950s, the A.B.A. approved resolutions opposing social security for lawyers and supporting a 25% ceiling on income taxes. It still has only a handful of Negro members. In 1960 it elected as president a Mississippian—John C. Satterfield—who later advised Governor Ross Barnett on how to keep Negroes out of the University of Mississippi.

Quiet Desegregationist. Now winds of change are blowing through the A.B.A. Last week's meeting boasted the first woman invited to address the A.B.A. assembly: the Dowager Marchioness of Reading, first (1958) woman to sit in Britain's House of Lords. This year's outgoing president, Arizonan Walter E. Craig, is a federal judge-select who stoutly defends the Supreme Court. His successor is Virginian Lewis F. Powell Jr., the moderate former chairman of the Richmond school board, who quietly desegregated that city's schools in 1959. Powell's exemplary platform: Speed up A.B.A. efforts to strengthen professional ethics, equalize criminal justice and defend the indigent.