Roger Billings - Abraham Lincoln, Esq.: The Legal Career of Americas Greatest President

Introduction
Roger Billings and Frank J. Williams

Reassessing Lincolns Legal Career
Harold Holzer

Lincolns Lessons for Lawyers
Frank J. Williams

Does Lawyer Lincoln Matter?
Mark E. Steiner

A. Lincoln, Respectable Prairie Lawyer
Brian Dirck

A. Lincoln, Debtor-Creditor Lawyer
Roger Billings

Lincoln and Illinois Real Estate: The Making of a Mortgage Lawyer
Roger Billings

The Power of Lincolns Legal Words
John A. Lupton

Competence, Diligence, and Getting Paid: Lincolns Lessons for Todays Ethical Lawyer
William T. Ellis and Billie J. Ellis Jr.

Lincolns Legal Ethics: The Client Correspondence
Roger Billings

Lincoln and the Kentuckians: Placing Lincoln in Context with Lawyers and Clients from His Native State
Christopher A. Schnell

Abraham Lincoln as Practical Constitutional Lawyer
Mackubin Thomas Owens

President Lincoln: The International Lawyer
William D. Pederson

Abraham Lincoln, Esq. features chapters by leading scholars on the professional career of Abraham Lincoln. Four chapters were first published in the Abraham Lincoln issue of the Northern Kentucky Law Review in 2009, which was supported by a grant from the Kentucky Historical Society. Another was first published in the Journal of Illinois History (summer 2005). Three are based on presentations for a symposium cosponsored by the New York City Bar Association and Scribes, the American Society of Legal Writers. The rest were written especially for this book.

The chapters are organized into three parts. Part One, Evaluating Lincolns Career, offers four authors assessments of Lincolns career. Harold Holzer, Brian Dirck, Mark Steiner, and Frank J. Williams are well known in the Lincoln field. Holzer is Senior Vice President for External Affairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and a preeminent scholar who has published numerous books on Lincoln. Dirck, a professor at Anderson University, has published the recent book Lincoln the Lawyer. Williams is the retired Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court. Mark Steiner, a Ph.D. in history and Professor of Law at South Texas College of Law, is author of a recent book on Lincoln, the lawyer, An Honest Calling.

The aim of Part Two, The Illinois Years, is to present overlooked aspects of Lincolns career in Illinois. The two chapters by Roger Billings on Lincoln as debtor-creditor and property lawyer reveal that the cases in those areas of Lincolns practice were his most important sources of income. The chapter on property law discusses rare examples of chattel mortgages when they were in the early stages of development as well as the more common real estate mortgages. Billings is Professor of Law at Salmon P. Chase College of Law, Northern Kentucky University.

John Lupton and Christopher Schnell (as well as Steiner in Part One) draw on their experience working for the Lincoln Legal Papers project in Springfield, now part of The Papers of Abraham Lincoln. Lupton, who has devoted his entire professional career to research on Lincolns law career, is director of History Programs with the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission. Schnell, formerly with the Papers project, is now pursuing further graduate studies.

Numerous books discuss Lincolns speeches and presidential writings, but they all overlook the words Lincoln wrote solely in his capacity as a lawyer. Billingss chapter on client letters reveals Lincolns verbal skills as he confronted ethical dilemmas. William T. Ellis and Billie J. Ellis Jr. dig further into the ethics of Lincolns practice. Their chapter traces several facets of Lincolns practice and provides lessons applicable to todays lawyer on how to comply with and transcend some of the most important Model Rules of Conduct. Schnells chapter sheds light on an aspect of Lincolns career that is generally overlooked: in central Illinois, Lincoln was essentially a Kentuckian practicing law among other Kentuckians. A great many of his clients and fellow lawyers in the Springfield area were born in Kentucky.

Part Three, The Washington Years, offers a fresh look at Lincoln as he used his legal background during the Civil War. Mackubin Thomas Owens, who teaches at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and William D. Pederson, who is director of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and a professor at Louisiana State University in Shreveport, discuss the legal skills Lincoln brought to constitutional and international law problems. Their chapters demonstrate clearly that Lincolns long, arduous, and intense legal career in Illinois, along with his political career, constituted his principal schooling and prepared him for later presidential duties, including the role of commander in chief. It proved to be dynamic training.

Lincoln biographers have often concluded that his legal practice ended on the day he last visited his law office. Nothing could be further from the truth. It would be more accurate to say that the most important part of Lincolns career as a lawyer was his presidency; there, he put to the highest use all that he had learned since his admission to the bar in 1837.