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Book Review
| Brian Dirck, Lincoln the Lawyer, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. 208. $56.95 (ISBN 978-0-252-03181-6).
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| Although Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer for nearly twenty-five years, his law practice has been generally neglected by scholars, who have only discussed the same handful of cases (David Donald's 1995 biography was a notable exception). Part of the problem was archival; thousands of documents pertaining to Lincoln's practice were scattered in repositories and courthouses. But scholars also weren't interested in the law practice because they didn't think it was interesting. Lincoln's law partner, William H. Herndon, apparently was not the only one who thought "a law office is a dull, dry place." |
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The Lincoln Legal Papers project solved the archival problem. The project photocopied thousands of documents, which were categorized, indexed, and digitized. In 2000, the fruits of this prodigious labor were published as a three-DVD set. Taking advantage of available technology, the trailblazing edition not only collected thousands of scanned documents, but includes a searchable database that allowed remarkably precise answers to queries. The staff of the Lincoln Legal Papers (now part of a larger project, the Papers of Abraham Lincoln) isn't finished: a more traditional documentary edition is scheduled for publication in 2008. |
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The Lincoln Legal Papers project has spurred new interest in Lincoln's law practice. Brian Dirck's book is the fourth study to use these documents; he makes excellent use of the database to give a valuable overview of Lincoln's practice. He gives the results of queries that shed considerable light on the nature of that practice. He also makes apt comparisons to other antebellum lawyers. Dirck's best chapter is on Lincoln's debt practice where he concludes that "insofar as Lincoln specialized in any area of law, he was a debt-collection attorney" (59). |
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Aside from the overview of Lincoln's practice, he makes two basic points about Lincoln the lawyer. He asserts that Lincoln kept his distance from his clients. This is a supposition as no direct evidence supports this claim. Lincoln's purported "distance" from clients may be nothing more than professional detachment or objectivity; lawyers have to assess the strength and weaknesses of their clients' cases, which is where detachment comes in handy. Dirck also provides instances where Lincoln became emotionally invested when personal considerations were involved. His other main point: that Lincoln's law practice taught him the value of "grease." Lawyer Lincoln helped lubricate the market economy by reducing friction to acceptable levels. Lincoln's conduct during the Civil War, particularly his magnanimity, was the function of lawyerly distance and his appreciation of the value of reducing friction. |
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Dirck's main points about lawyer Lincoln don't seem all that connected to the vast collection of documents at his disposal. Declarations cribbed from form books, demurrers, and proposed judgments have a limit on what they tell us about the scrivener. Dirck thus moves briskly and doesn't linger long on any cases. Dirck also provides imagined client interviews by Lincoln, which I found unconvincing since his imaginary Lincoln doesn't mention fees and the real Lincoln once noted that "the matter of fees is important far beyond the mere question of bread and butter involved." The epilogue is a counterfactual exercise on whether Lincoln would have resumed his law practice had he not been, you know, shot. |
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In his introduction, Dirck says his interest in legal history is secondary to his interest in Lincoln. He does shed some light on antebellum legal practice and the importance of debt in that practice; but his interest in what he calls "arcane legal subjects" does seem fleeting. For example, he writes that lawyers on the circuit "lived on their wits, without the safety net of precedents and case law to back them in their in reasoning" (45). But why would a lawyer like Lincoln forget the law that he knew simply because he was on circuit? And didn't lawyers riding circuit associate with lawyers in the towns into which they rode, and wouldn't those lawyers have ready access to the books? |
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The endnotes are disappointing and raise questions about how materials from an electronic archive should be cited. Dirck doesn't cite to any particular legal document from the LLP electronic edition; there are no citations to specific declarations or demurrers or docket entries, even when he's quoting them. He provides only a citation to the case file itself (e.g., "Grant v. Combs, April 1857, LLP"). Moreover, these abbreviated citations also omit the identifying numbers of individual documents and case files from the electronic edition. When armed with these numbers, a researcher could retrieve documents directly, instead of using the somewhat cumbersome search boxes. |
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Brian Dirck has written an accessible account of lawyer Lincoln. His book also suggests that legal historians should not overlook the usefulness of the Lincoln Legal Papers. |
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| Mark E. Steiner
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| South Texas College of Law |
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