Sometime last month there was a news article that every living person who has served as President of the United States is descended from ancestors who owned slave. I discussed this in a blog entry — if you’re interested in reading it, you can the check the archives for June.
But that got me to thinking about our presidents…. I know a fair number of them have been lawyers — I wondered just how many. I figured a bit of my extensive research could come up with the number pretty quick.
But — like a lot of things the answer isn’t as simple or straightforward as I though it would be. It appears that more than half of all United States Presidents were lawyers before becoming president.
But — some of the earlier presidents like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln were lawyers, but never attended law school or received a law degree. I should note that many of the first “lawyer presidents” participated in apprenticeships to become lawyers because at the time there was no such thing as law school.
Former presidents who did receive law degrees include Rutherford B. Hayes, William Howard Taft, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It turns out that two other presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt were awarded law degrees by the Columbia Law School in 2008 — more than 100 years after they attended the school.
So my extensive research concluded that 26 of the Presidents have actually worked as lawyers.
I’ve heard it said that lawyers are the foot soldiers of our Constitution — I’ll just let you ponder that along with me….
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