| "Bohemian Justice" tells the story of European immigrants and their relationship to New York's legal profession between Reconstruction and the Great Depression. Although historians have examined how law has regulated immigrants, they have paid little attention to how immigrants became litigants or American lawyers themselves. By using published materials, archival sources, and privately maintained documents, this study explores how immigrants---mainly from southern and eastern Europe---tried to pass through Ellis Island, used the law after suffering personal injuries at work and at home, and studied at city law schools. In these contexts, European immigrants found ways to improvise their own legal descriptions of everyday life by relying on themselves, families, neighbors, and local lawyers. At the same time though, New York's more established lawyers persistently interpreted immigrants' legal strategies as being inconsistent with their profession's highest duties, and they promoted many reforms to maintain control over the practice of law.; By 1930, after the imposition of federal quotas on immigration, the reformation of city law schools, and a crack-down against so-called "ambulance chasers," European immigrants found it difficult to practice law in New York without first heeding the duties of professionalism. Nonetheless, the practices that European immigrants had followed before the Great Depression inspired certain New Deal lawyers, like Columbia Law School professor Karl Llewellyn, to propose establishing neighborhood legal clinics in every major American city. This study shows how law has been an arena of social and cultural conflict and how proposals for legal reform, in surprising ways, have built upon previous social struggles. |
