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Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law, and Power in the New South. By WILLiAM G. THOMAS. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. xx, 318 pp. $47.50 cloth; $24.95 paper.
THis excellent study is a confirmation of it's epigraph: "a good lawyer is about the best man in the world, and a mean lawyer is probably about the meanest man in the world." As historians of the railroads in late-nineteenth-century America would expect, there are very few of the former to be found in this book and many of the latter.
The author, who teaches history at the University of Virginia, explores the role of railroad lawyers in the New South's developing political economy. As the numerous regional lines were consolidated into a few major interstate railroads, the now familiar pattern of corporate abuses and governmental reforms generated a large volume of legal business. The emerging interstate lines had few peers in reshaping the American economy, and that applied with equal validity to the business of law. Litigation spawned by the railroad business divided the bar between corporation lawyers and personal-injury lawyers who represented plaintiffs in suits against the railroad corporations.
Certainly there was a great deal of injury inflicted upon property and person by the heavy trains as they rumbled across the...