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39 Ark. L. Rev. 631 (1985-1986)
Felix Frankfurter, the Old Boy Network, and the New Deal: The Placement of Elite Lawyers in Public Service in the 1930s

handle is hein.journals/arklr39 and id is 641 raw text is: Felix Frankfurter, the Old Boy Network, and the New Deal: The Placement of Elite Lawyers in Public Service in the 1930s G. Edward White* We may be inclined to forget-partly because of the now considerable distance between the 1930s and our own times, and partly because of the professional culture we encounter today-that it is possible to advance two generalizations about lawyers in public service in twentieth-century America. The first generalization is that there was a time when practically no lawyers went into public service; the second is that there was a time when public service work was perceived as one of the most prestigious and important employment opportunities offered recent graduates of American law schools. Of these generalizations, the most surprising feature of the second may be how odd it sounds in today's world. Many of the individuals who considered public service their most exciting professional option, and who came to regard time in public service as an essential prerequisite of an elite lawyer's1 professional training, have reached retirement age in law schools and law firms. On many law faculties a pattern of clerkships, government service, and subsequent entry into aca- demic life has been replaced by a pattern of clerkships and subsequent entry into academics, with government service, often in the form of a judgeship, coming after an academic reputation is established. Recent graduates of law schools have tended overwhelmingly to work in the private sector: a * Professor of Law and History, University of Virginia. B.A., Amherst College, 1963; M.A. 1964, Ph.D. 1967, Yale; J.D., Harvard, 1970. This article is a revised ver- sion of the third annual Hartman Hotz Lecture in Law and Liberal Arts, delivered at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville on November 14, 1985. 1. The term elite lawyers, for the purposes of this article, refers to a graduate of one of the law schools perceived to be at the top of the status hierarchy of legal educa- tion, and thus to afford to its graduates a wide range of professional opportunities. Be- tween 1900 and 1940 the number of such schools was comparatively small: Harvard, Columbia, and Yale. See R. STEVENS, LAW SCHOOL 73-91, 131-54 (1983). After 1940 the term encompasses graduates of several additional schools.

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