More Than 200 Years in the Making...

The story of lawyers in the developing history of Alabama opens in Mississippi Territory days with the appointment by President Thomas Jefferson of the first territorial judge in St. Stephens, the earliest settlement in what would become Alabama, and continues to present day Alabama, where the profession has grown to more than 16,000 members.

In these pages you will read about the people who pioneered Alabama’s legal profession. Individuals like Walter Bragg, credited both with ending radical reconstruction in Alabama and being the founding president of the Alabama State Bar. There’s Hugo Black, Frank Johnson and U.W. Clemon, federal jurists who helped end the segregated “southern way of life” by their decisions in cases brought by Alabama’s great civil rights and civil liberties lawyers such as Arthur Shores, Oscar Adams, Fred Gray and Vernon Crawford, to cite a few. Women also figure prominently. People like Maud McLure Kelly, Nina Miglionico, Annie Lola Price, Camille Wright Cook, Janie Shores, Sue Bell Cobb and Alyce Manley Spruell, who have opened the way for the expanded presence of women in the profession.

Publication of this book was co-sponsored by the History and Archives Committee of the Alabama State Bar and the Alabama Bench and Bar Historical Society. Proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Alabama Law Foundation and the Bench and Bar Historical Society.

Price: $40 per copy