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.

The center of A.B.A. power is the 275-member house of delegates, a combine of 50 state-elected delegates and representatives of other legal groups, such as the National Conference of Bar Examiners. The house controls the election of all national officers. Equally important, it passes on resolutions prepared by the A.B.A.'s workhorse committees and "sections"--permanent groups that do everything from evaluating U.S. law schools to screening nominees for the federal bench. Most section ideas get fast house approval. But not always. Last week the house tabled a resolution backing an end to national origin as a basis for U.S. immigration quotas. Too controversial, ruled the majority.

Broad Concerns. Despite such caution, the A.B.A. can claim credit for many legislative reforms--from the 1891 act creating federal circuit courts of appeal, to the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act governing federal regulatory agencies, to new legislation enabling federal courts to pay court-appointed lawyers. To aid law students, it approved last week its first $2,000,000 student loan program. To educate practicing lawyers, it sponsors more than 40 publications, from the A.B.A. Journal to the Practical Lawyer. To train green state trial judges, it recently founded a summer "college" in Colorado. To spur legal research, it runs Chicago's $600,000-a-year American Bar Foundation. Though its 83 canons of ethics have yet to be uniformly obeyed or even favored, the A.B.A. is still the only bar group with the power (and increasingly the will) to set high standards across the country. One measure of all this change is the Independent Bar Association--a newly organized group of conservative lawyers who criticize the A.B.A. for being too liberal.

* The get-'em-in-the-tent title of a lecture on insurance law.

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