2 - The “American Aristocracy”

Summary

We start in Chapter 2 by discussing how the bar – the nation’s attorneys – occupies a historically prominent place within American politics. As we show, the United States is quite unusual in this respect. Unlike European countries, where governments have (historically at least) been populated by members of an aristocratic class, the United States had no entrenched nobility; the bar emerged as an educated, wealthy class, and, as some historical observers noted, occupied the role that in other countries had been assumed by the nobility. Over time, the organized bar emerged, and it developed fairly conservative policy interests and economic and regulatory interests. As we document via a series of novel empirical findings, this has contributed to American exceptionalism in several policy areas, most pronounced in those areas relevant to the bar and its interests.