The history of the professions in England before 1800 is attracting steadily increasing academic interest. Among the most popular areas for study has been the legal profession, and especially its lower branch, the attorneys. A number of these studies have shown that attorneys played a significant role in provincial and metropolitan society during the eighteenth century. Yet, despite the existence of good and detailed information about the distribution of eighteenth century attorneys, no systematic attempt has yet been made to assess the actual number of practitioners present in England (and Wales) at that period. Using lists from both the early eighteenth century and the very beginning of the nineteenth, this article aims to put that right by sketching the statistical background to the energetic and many-sided activities of the attorney, and especially the country variety. The object is to see something of how one numerous branch of an influential profession responded to the economic and social changes of the eighteenth century.

Shortly after Henry II had succeeded to the English throne, Richard of Anstey commenced litigation against his cousin, Mabel de Francheville. His uncle, William de Sackville, had held a sizeable mesne barony, consisting of at least seven Essex manors and the overlordship of ten knights' fees in Essex and three neighbouring counties. Richard's aim was to secure this property for himself. Mabel claimed that (as William's daughter and heiress) she was rightfully in possession. Richard asserted that she was illegitimate, the issue of a marriage that had been annulled by the Church; and that as Williams's nephew, the eldest son of William's sister, the lands should pass to him, as William's heir. The litigation began in 1158 in the king's court; but once the question of Mabel's status had been raised it was transferred to the Church courts. Her legitimacy was discussed in turn in the court of the archbishop of Canterbury, before papal judges delegate, and finally before the papal court of audience in Rome. The eventual decision was that Mabel was illegitimate. The case then returned to the king's court, and, some five years after the proceedings had begun, the king's court awarded William de Sackville's lands to Richard of Anstey.

Before a gathering of the White House Press corps on March 21, 1930, President Herbert Hoover announced his nomination for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court to fill a vacancy unexpectedly created by the death of Edward T. Sanford. His nominee was forty-four year old native North Carolinian John J. Parker, a member since 1925 of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Within days of the nomination organized labor and its allies in Congress and the press unleashed withering attacks on a single judicial opinion authored by Parker. In the process, the priority of issues raised in that case was dramatically inverted. The foremost issue, federal jurisdiction, became subordinated to the scope of an injunctive decree, an issue of secondary importance. Thus, the nominee's three year old opinion in International Union, United Mine Workers of America v. Red Jacket Consolidated Coal and Coke Company became the catalyst for transforming him from relative obscurity into a symbol of anti-labor conservatism.

In April of 1873, the United States Supreme Court rejected Myra Bradwell's claim that the right to practice law should be acknowledged as one of the privileges and immunities of United States citizenship. Thus, the first case of sex discrimination to be heard by the Court was resolved against the woman, as would be every subsequent claim but one for the next ninety-eight years.

History abounds with debates which turn on the seemingly innocuous question as to whether fundamental change did or did not occur in any particular period. Many such controversies are well-known: Was there or was there not a ‘Tudor revolution’? Was there or was there not an ‘agricultural revolution’? What about a ‘great transformation’? A revolutionary change in Canadian government in 1982? A ‘making’ of the English working class? A ‘transformation’ or ‘Americanization’ of American law? Are we or are we not at the present conjuncture in the process of a fundamental—and globe spanning—transformation to a dominant corporatist ideology? The examples of this sort of debate can be multiplied almost endlessly.

‘United to protect, not combined to injure.’ With these words in 1840 the United Society of Brushmakers, bore witness to a shift in the language of labor organizations. While community of experience and interests was always what held such groups together, there was uncertainty in the first part of the nineteenth century about what to call them. Their name in the statute book, dating back to the early eighteenth century, was ‘combination’. Some workmen proudly adopted the term: ‘by combination we shall succeed’ proclaimed the Amalgamated Society of Journeymen Cloggers. But ‘combination’ suffered by association with the ancient and pejorative word: ‘conspiracy’.

Many legal scholars consider the colonial period irrelevant to the subsequent history of American law. In 1936 Roscoe Pound defined the ‘formative era’ in American law as the post-revolutionary era, and legal historians have been bound by that periodization ever since. More recently, Grant Gilmore, in his book The Ages of American Law, began his first age, the ‘age of discovery’, at approximately 1800; Gilmore claimed that American lawyers had the opportunity at that time to create an American law essentially from scratch. Morton J. Horwitz further strengthened the reigning assumptions regarding the unimportance of the legal history of colonial America in his influential book The Transformation of American Law 1780–1860. In Horwitz's view, what marks the American legal system is the instrumental use of law to promote social change, particularly to further commercial interests, and this aspect of the law did not exist until the early nineteenth century.

In 1898, the year Americans first sailed forth to fight in other countries to protect purported victims of imperialism, A. V. Dicey steamed into Harvard University to deliver his lectures on Law and Public Opinion in England. Like William Blackstone, Vinerian Professor before him, Dicey deployed a number of memorable epigrams to capture what seemed basic truths of his day. Dicey's assertion that ‘protection invariably involves disability’ appeared to state the obvious to Americans at the turn of the century.

In this essay I will consider how the United States Supreme Court embraced Dicey's epigram and translated it into decisions during the tenures of Chief Justices Fuller and White about the capacity of the individual in the United States to contract and care for himself.