What Lawyers Do

The WSJ blog has a piece about how as the 44th President of the United States, Obama is the 25th to be a lawyer. His law degree is from Harvard which, surprisingly, makes him only the second HLS grad to become President (the other is Rutherford Hayes).

Here is the list, courtesy of the WSJ blog, of all the lawyers-turned-presidents:

#2 — John Adams (Harvard, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#3 — Thomas Jefferson (College of William & Mary, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#4 — James Madison (College of New Jersey — now Princeton — then read law)

#6 — John Quincy Adams (Harvard, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#7 — Andrew Jackson (self-taught lawyer)

#8 — Martin Van Buren (Kinderhook Academy, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#10 — John Tyler (College of William & Mary, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#11 — James Polk (University of North Carolina, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#13 — Millard Fillmore (clerked for and studied under New York Judge Walter Wood)

#14 — Franklin Pierce (Bowdoin College, then studied law)

#15 — James Buchanan (Dickinson College, then studied law)

#16 — Abraham Lincoln (No formal education, a self-taught lawyer)

#19 — Rutherford Hayes (Kenyon College, Harvard law)

#21 — Chester Arthur (Union College, then studied law)

#22 — Grover Cleveland (apprenticed as a lawyer)

#23 — Benjamin Harrison (Miami University in Ohio, then studied law)

#25 — William McKinley (Allegheny College, Albany law)

#27 — William Howard Taft (Yale, Cincinnati law)

#28 — Woodrow Wilson (College of New Jersey — now Princeton — then UVA law)

#30 — Calvin Coolidge (Amherst, then apprenticed as a lawyer)

#32 — Franklin Roosevelt (Harvard, Columbia law)

#37 — Richard Nixon (Whittier College, Duke law)

#38 — Gerald Ford (University of Michigan, Yale law)

#42 — Bill Clinton (Georgetown University, Yale law)

#44 — Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard law)