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73 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 679 (2011-2012)
Capital, Labor and Lawyers: The Changing Roles and Rising Influence of the Pittsburgh Bar during the Gilded Age

handle is hein.journals/upitt73 and id is 709 raw text is: CAPITAL, LABOR AND LAWYERS: THE CHANGING ROLES AND RISING INFLUENCE OF THE PITTSBURGH BAR DURING THE GILDED AGE Ron Schuler* ABSTRACT As lawyers in an American frontier city, Pittsburgh's 19th century lawyers were accustomed, perhaps to a greater degree than their cousins in the large Eastern cities, to being involved with business. Thomas Mellon, founder of the Mellon banking empire, was a lawyer and judge who embodied the entrepreneurial spirit of the Pittsburgh lawyer; and following the Civil War, with the rise of Pittsburgh's industrial power, business-oriented lawyers such as Mellon would be a model for the new corporation lawyer in Pittsburgh-functioning as the intimate business advisor and social peer of tycoons such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and George Westinghouse. Inevitably, labor organized into unions, in response to the corporatization of capital, and Pittsburgh's first labor lawyer, William Brennen-in a sort of mirror image of the business-oriented corporation lawyers-entered the law after having experienced the inner-workings of a steel mill and participated in the union movement. Pittsburgh's corporation lawyers, however, maintained capital's upper hand against labor-a fact for which the Homestead Strike of 1892 is emblematic-and became among the most influential lawyers in the nation. . Managing Member of the Pittsburgh Office of Spilman, Thomas & Battle, PLLC. Portions of this article are excerpted from an unpublished work-in-progress, commissioned by the Allegheny County Bar Association, tentatively entitled The Steel Bar: Reinventions of the Legal Profession in an American City of Industry and Commerce, 1788-Present. The author is indebted to Thomas M. Thompson and Bernard Hibbitts for their comments on the unpublished manuscript, and to Samuel I. Yamron for his assistance in finalizing this article for publication.