Legal News

Barack Obama: The U.S.?s 44th President (and 25th Lawyer-President!)

By Dan Slater

President-elect Barack Obama during his acceptance speech at Grant Park in Chicago, Nov. 4, 2008. (AP/Morry Gash)

After Barack Obama’s smashing defeat of GOP nominee John McCain in the Electoral College and his crossing of one of the most formidable racial barriers the country has confronted, even harder work begins.

As Obama suggested in his acceptance speech last night, a long road lies ahead. Commentators, grasping for parallels, compare his arrival in the Oval Office to Abraham Lincoln (a self-taught lawyer) encountering the Civil War and Franklin D. Roosevelt (Harvard, Columbia law) coming to Washington amid the Great Depression.

We won’t predict his success, but we will point out that Obama’s Harvard law degree puts him in the company of our 19th president, Rutherford Hayes (Kenyon College, Harvard law), the only other president — believe it or not — to hold a JD from the Law School. Below is a complete list of our lawyer-presidents.

#2 — John Adams (Harvard, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#3 — Thomas Jefferson (College of William & Mary, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#4 — James Madison (College of New Jersey — now Princeton — then read law)

#6 — John Quincy Adams (Harvard, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#7 — Andrew Jackson (self-taught lawyer)

#8 — Martin Van Buren (Kinderhook Academy, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#10 — John Tyler (College of William & Mary, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#11 — James Polk (University of North Carolina, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#13 — Millard Fillmore (clerked for and studied under New York Judge Walter Wood)

#14 — Franklin Pierce (Bowdoin College, then studied law)

#15 — James Buchanan (Dickinson College, then studied law)

#16 — Abraham Lincoln (No formal education, a self-taught lawyer)

#19 — Rutherford Hayes (Kenyon College, Harvard law)

#21 — Chester Arthur (Union College, then studied law)

#22 — Grover Cleveland (apprenticed as a lawyer)

#23 — Benjamin Harrison (Miami University in Ohio, then studied law)

#25 — William McKinley (Allegheny College, Albany law)

#27 — William Howard Taft (Yale, Cincinnati law)

#28 — Woodrow Wilson (College of New Jersey — now Princeton — then UVA law)

#30 — Calvin Coolidge (Amherst, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#32 — Franklin Roosevelt (Harvard, Columbia law)

#37 — Richard Nixon (Whittier College, Duke law)

#38 — Gerald Ford (University of Michigan, Yale law)

#42 — Bill Clinton (Georgetown University, Yale law)

#44 — Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard law)

NOTE: Our 33rd president, Harry Truman, was the only president who served after 1897 not to earn a college degree. However he did study law for two years at the Kansas City Law School, now the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. We’ll also point out that Warren Harding, our 29th president, enjoyed great success as a journalist before rising to the White House, yet, sadly, never became a lawyer.

Correction: Earlier versions of this post incorrectly stated that Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson were not lawyers. An earlier version also incorrectly included Theodore Roosevelt in the list of lawyer-presidents. Roosevelt left Columbia law school before graduating.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on November 05, 2008 (boomark / email).