THE EARLY VIRGINIA BAR
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THE EARLY VIRGINIA BAR BY WILLIAM ROMAINE TYREE IN speaking of the early days of the Bench at the cost of taking from our profession and Bar of Virginia, one's curiosity is that incentive for pure, unalloyed thought, naturally aroused as to the life, both pro which our predecessors used with such fessional and domestic, of these early barris powerful effect in their arguments. ters — we wish to know what were the habits And now let us take a cursory glance at of the times among our prototypes of the the early legal life and customs of Virginia. past. And from all we hear and read of However, of the first days of the infant there this life, the difference seems vast in com is little, or no authentic information, except parison to our own material age, in which it that for many years the profession went has grown from a profession into an ordinary through the fiery furnace, inasmuch as there business calling, requiring much legal acumen was great opposition brought to bear upon and great business ability. it by the aristocracy of the colony. Let one enter now the offices of a promi We cannot say what practise our old nent firm of attorneys in our cities — large historical acquaintance, Nathaniel Bacon, or small cities —• and what a contrast is may have enjoyed, or as to its class. We presented as we recall what has indelibly do know, though, that he was an able mem been fixed in our minds and greatly ber of the guild; if not by quiet acquiescence heightened by our own imagination, of a in the policy of the colonial government, by lawyer's office one hundred or more years the strife which he afterwards engendered. ago. Time which has revolutionized our Our imagination — from this domestic age business methods has laid strong hands — may likewise conjure up the thought of upon the law itself, or, at least, its practice vast retainers paid him by London Trading and its every-day methods. companies for the use of his shrewd and able Rarely do we find to-day one of our sect mind and which, also, must have been reaching his conclusion from a thorough employed at odd moments upon real estate study and mastery of the great principles speculations, all of which were forfeited by of the law from arduous perusals of Coke, reason of his irascible disposition; so he Blackstone, Littleton's Tenures and other seems to be better known to us as a turbulent great masterpieces of the profession, thus character than a guardian of justice. keeping ever before him the celebrated His life seems not to have been of that phrase of Coke's, "The reason of the law is placid indifference to the outside world the life of the law, but we find our latter-day which marks the period of our successful practitioner reaching for his digests, where lawyer; but was lived like those of the ' he may consult, through its aid, a decision adventurers around him, in the smashin point upon the subject — here lies one buckling escapades of the period — his of the greatest differences between past and office must have been at Jamestown, but present; our ancestors were compelled to his practice was, no doubt, diffuse. more individual and independent actions Our next step, in the progress of the legal of thought; we, to-day, have had it all profession, is toward the days of our first thrashed out for us, and it continues to be barristers, Edward Barradall and Sir John handed to us without any effort on our part Randolph — this era, in reality, marks the but to pay our book bills. We may well beginning of the history of the legal pro ask ourselves, have we benefited greatly by fession in Virginia and the report of cases in this change? In some ways, greatly, yet, which they were counsel; for, while from the
