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Book Cover for: The Anointed: New York's White Shoe Law Firms--How They Started, How They Grew, and How They Ran the Country, Jeremiah Lambert

The Anointed: New York's White Shoe Law Firms--How They Started, How They Grew, and How They Ran the Country

Jeremiah Lambert

This is the story of how and why such powerhouse Wall Street law firms as Cravath, Swaine & Moore, Davis Polk & Wardwell, and Sullivan & Cromwell, grew from nineteenth-century entrepreneurial origins into icons of institutional law practice, and how, as white-shoe bastions with the social standards of an exclusive gentleman's club, they promoted the values of an east coast elite.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Lyons Press
  • Publish Date: Mar 16th, 2021
  • Pages: 256
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.10in - 6.30in - 1.10in - 1.19lb
  • EAN: 9781493056330
  • Categories: United States - 20th CenturyBusiness LawInfrastructure

About the Author

Jeremiah D. Lambert, a nationally recognized lawyer who has advised clients in the electricity and natural gas industries, also served as Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors of Global Crossing Ltd. during that company's Chapter 11 reorganization and thereafter as a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of its post-bankruptcy successor. Mr. Lambert is the author of The Power Brokers, a narrative history of the electric utility industry in the United States published by MIT Press in 2015, How Deregulation Went Wrong (PennWell 2006), and Creating Competitive Power Markets: the PJM Model (PennWell 2001), among other books and publications. Mr. Lambert, a member of the New York and District of Columbia bars, commenced his legal career in New York City as an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore and later practiced as a co-founder of Peabody, Lambert & Meyers in Washington, D.C. and as a partner in several national firms. He is a graduate of Princeton University, a former Fulbright Scholar, and a graduate of Yale Law School. He is married to Sanda Kayden Lambert and resides in Palm Beach, Florida.

Geoffrey S. Stewart is a Washington-based lawyer who handles complex commercial and international litigation. He attended Brown University, where he received his A.B. (Honors) and A.M degrees in European history and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Mr. Stewart received his legal training at Harvard Law School and began his legal career at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York and Washington, D.C. He served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Policy in 1982-83 and was Associate Counsel to the Office of Independent Counsel Iran/Contra from 1987 to 1991. Mr. Stewart was a partner of the firm Hale and Dorr from 1986 to 1999 and a partner of the firm Jones Day from 1999 to 2018. He lives in the Washington, D.C. area with his wife, Sandra Baker, who for many years produced the Diane Rehm Show, syndicated on National Public Radio.

Praise for this book

The Anointed shows evidence of a great deal of research, and the subject is fascinating... The authors' central (if implicit) point is a good one. The old era was ruled by loyalty and social connections. The profit motive that replaced it may have been crass, but it imposed a welcome regime of merit.

The authors turn the evolution of law over the century into a lively history, with accounts of fighting the New Deal and in-house disagreements over working with Nazis. Those looking for a shrewd inside take on elite law firms will find this brings the goods.

The one hundred and eighty-two pages rigorously researched book is loaded with insightful references that give readers a complete picture of the rise of the White-Shoe New York law firms and their immense influence on society.

Lambert '59 and Stewart chronicle the rise of the nation's most enduring law firms, all situated in Manhattan: Sullivan & Cromwell, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, Davis Polk & Wardwell, and their ilk. The Anointed renders unsparingly the elite milieu in which the firms' founders -- white, male, Protestant, and well pedigreed -- worked, lived, and strove with and against one another.