Reviewed by John P. Heinz, American Bar Foundation and Northwestern University. This is a book about an elite within an elite within an elite.
Lawyers are, of course, a relatively select group, even in America, even now.
Though their numbers have burgeoned in the last two decades, and it sometimes seems as though every other person on the bus is a lawyer distributing business cards, the U.S. citizen's chance of becoming a lawyer is still only about one in 340. And though they are the subject of denigrating jokes, lawyers still occupy 60 percent of the seats in the U.S. Senate. Within the legal profession, lawyers who have ever had a case before the Supreme Court are an elite of the elite. There are about 800,000 lawyers in the U.S. today, but only 134,000 have been admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court since 1925, of whom some substantial, unknown number have surely died. Fewer than a tenth of all living lawyers, then, have ever put their names on papers filed in the Supreme Court.