This paper employs data from the United States Census to raise questions about the historical demography of the legal profession in the United States between 1850 and 1980. I describe in turn (1) national lawyer population trends, (2) regional shifts in the number and ratio of lawyers to population, and (3) changes in the gender composition of the profession. The paper then considers issues concerned with demand theories of lawyer population dynamics, monopoly and supply theories, and theories of gender segmentation.
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Terence C. Halliday (1986) studied this question.
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