In early April, I was in Springfield, Illinois, to spend time with family and we saw the home of Abraham Lincoln and the various Lincoln-related things there. One surprising fact I learned is that Lincoln wrote to his old law partner, William Herndon, and told Herndon that after his presidency, he wanted to return to Springfield so they could return to practicing law together as if nothing had happened.
Obviously, that didn’t happen; the pesky matter of being dead put a bit of a crimp in his plans. It did make me wonder, though, if any other lawyer-presidents had practiced law after leaving the presidency. I asked the National Park Service ranger, but she didn’t know, so I looked into it myself.
Of course, there was William Howard Taft, who served as chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1921 to 1930. I’d known about that before, but I had forgotten when I asked the question. But what I didn’t know until looking it up was that he was also a law professor at Yale from 1913 to 1921 and served a year as president of the American Bar Association while teaching at Yale. As far as I know, he never represented any clients as an attorney after his presidency, but Taft had a major law-related career after being president.
As for representing a client in court, the most serious post-presidential law practice must go to Benjamin Harrison. His practice included representing the Republic of Venezuela in an 1898 border dispute with British Guiana (now Guyana). Venezuela and the United Kingdom agreed to have the dispute heard in an international court in Paris. (The UK was a party to the dispute because it was a British colony; it wasn’t independent until 1966.) Harrison traveled to Paris and spent more than 25 hours in court representing Venezuela. Although Harrison lost the case, his arguments were well regarded around the world.
Grover Cleveland practiced law during the four-year period between his two nonconsecutive terms as president, but not after his second term.
Chester A. Arthur served “of counsel” for the firm of Arthur, Knevals & Ransom, but his work was limited by his ill health.
And the most half-assed law practice of any ex-president had to be that of Woodrow Wilson. He went into partnership with Bainbridge Colby to form a new law firm, showed up for work for one day and never returned.
Bill Clinton never tried to practice law after leaving office, but he may have the all-time booby prize among lawyer-presidents. His law license was suspended for five years after 2001, when he acknowledged misconduct during Paula Jones’ lawsuit against him. I doubt he would have practiced law after leaving office even if he could; there have been four other lawyer-presidents since Wilson who didn’t die in office who didn’t practice law after leaving the presidency. (Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Barack Obama. I’m not including Joe Biden since he’s still president as of this writing.)