This is a book about German lawyers in private practice, but it is also an effort to address larger questions about the social and political history of Germany between the middle of the nineteenth century and the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933. It traces the history of German lawyers from the heady days of legal and professional reform in 1878 to their abject defeat in a quiet and swift “coordination” in the spring of 1933. In the 1870s, lawyers could bask in the widespread liberal assessment of their profession as a sort of Hegelian “general estate,” representing the general interest and the common good and entitled to respect, deference, and leadership. Opinion leaders believed that reform of the legal profession formed the touchstone of success in the project of the liberal Bürgertum to bring into existence its chief goal of the Rechtsstaat, the state ruled by law. Lawyers and liberals achieved almost all of their aims for the legal profession in 1878, carving out space for the bar to create its own institutions, to govern its internal affairs, and to assume the important public role that theory ascribed to it.

But developments between 1878 and 1933 did not turn out the way that either the liberal reformers, most of whom were legally trained and many of whom were private practitioners, or professional leaders of the bar expected.