| Carter Ledyard & Milburn LLP | |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | New York City |
| No. of offices | 2 |
| No. of attorneys | about 100 |
| Major practice areas | General practice |
| Revenue | NA |
| Date founded | 1854 |
| Company type | LLP |
| Website | |
| www.clm.com | |
Carter Ledyard & Milburn LLP is a New York City law firm. It has more than 100 attorneys with offices in New York and Washington, D.C..
The firm was founded in 1854 by Henry Scudder and James C. Carter. Those partners along with Henry’s younger brother Townsend, who subsequently joined the firm, practiced together for twenty years until 1874, when Townsend Scudder died. Henry Scudder and Carter continued the partnership for twelve more years until 1886, when Scudder died. In the meantime, Lewis Cass Ledyard had joined the firm as an associate in 1875, and was admitted as a partner in 1881. Upon Scudder’s death the firm became Carter & Ledyard (1886–1888); when Daniel G. Rollins ended his term as Surrogate of New York County he joined the firm, which became known as Carter, Rollins & Ledyard (1888–1889), and when Rollins retired a year later, it became Carter & Ledyard again (1889–1904) and finally Carter, Ledyard & Milburn in 1904, when John G. Milburn became a partner.
When John G. Milburn joined the firm in 1904, there were three partners, Lewis Cass Ledyard, Edmund L. Baylies and George A. Miller, and two associates, Walter F. Taylor and Joseph W. Welsh, a total of five lawyers.
In New York, Milburn was consulted by many clients, corporate and individual, and was engaged in several important lawsuits. Conspicuous among these was the suit instituted by the United States in 1906, under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, against The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Milburn, along with Joseph Welsh and Walter Taylor, worked for many years on this landmark case which was finally decided by the Supreme Court in May, 1911. The story in the office is that not long after Milburn came to New York he attended a large banquet and sat next to John Archibald, who was the executive head of the Standard Oil Company. That evening John G. made such an impression on Archibald that the firm of CL&M was retained as one of the counsel for the defense in the Government’s anti-trust case.
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James Coolidge Carter was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts on October 14, 1827, the youngest child of a large and needy family. He entered Harvard College in 1846 and graduated in 1850. He rowed stroke oar in his class boat and was class orator at commencement. Joseph H. Choate said of him:
After graduating from college, Carter came to New York and spent a year as a tutor to support himself. It was during this time that he worked in the office of Kent & Davies; while his attendance was only nominal, during the short time that he was there, he made enough of an impression on Henry where Carter was studying law to see him. Davies told Carter that the firm of Kent & Davies was about to be dissolved, that the name of Davies & Scudder at 66 Wall Street, and that he wanted Carter accepted the position, and shortly thereafter was admitted to the New York bar. After about a year, Davies & Scudder dissolved when Davies left to become Corporation Counsel of The City of New York. So in 1854, at the age of 28, after one year of practice, Carter became a junior partner in Scudder & Carter which, under its successive organization leading to CL&M has, in the words of Joseph Choate, “occupied a great place in the annals of the profession in New York.”
Young Carter, instead of deriving any special benefit from it at the outset of his career, had to make his own way by dint of long hours and hard work. Starting with little money and no major clients, Carter by 1865 had become prominent as a litigator and was being sought out by other lawyers to assist them in their cases. Thus, he was asked by Charles O’Conor, a well-known New York lawyer, to assist him in number of cases, including an action against William Marcy Tweed, Boss of Tammany Hall, to recover the plunder which boss Tweed had taken. The famous David Dudley Field represented the defendant. The preparation and trial or the case by Carter and O’Conor were outstanding. The City of New York recovered a verdict of over $60,000,000.
As a result of his endeavors in the Tweed case, in 1877 Carter was appointed a member of Governor Tilden’s commission to devise a plan for the government of cities, to prevent a repetition of Tweed’s system. The plan which the Commission proposed was that the government of cities should be non-partisan; as a result, it was not adopted.
In 1870 Carter joined with other prominent New York lawyers in establishing The Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and he was twice president of The Association, first 1884–1885 and a second time in 1897–1899.
As Professor Robert W. Gordon of Stanford law School points out, during the years from 1870 to 1900 Carter was involved in many of the important movements for the reform of New York City government: he was a member of the Tilden Commission mentioned above, the anti-Tammany Committee of Seventy (formed by seventy members of The Association of the Bar to oppose Tammany boss Richard Croker, the National Municipal League, (of which he as president in 1896), the Citizens Union (which he helped to found), the Good Government Clubs, and the City Club (of which Carter had been its first president). Carter was also a member of the Committee of One Hundred (actually 104 members) organized to support a reform plan for New York City schools.
Under Carter’s leadership, the Bar Association was also prominent in defeating David Dudley Field’s proposed civil code. The arguments Carter then framed and addressed to successive legislatures and governors led to the final rejection of the code. His views were published in a series of pamphlets, the first of which appeared in 1884 under the title The Proposed Codification of our Common Law. “The main theme of carter’s argument,” according to George W. Martin, “was built on a distinction he drew between ‘written’ or statutory law, originated and occasionally repealed or revised by the legislature, and the ‘unwritten’ or common law, which was revealed by the decisions of judges.”[2] With respect to the unwritten law, Carter maintained that the judge’s function was “to apply the existing standard of justice (Carter’s emphasis) to the new exhibition of fact, and to do this by ascertaining the conclusion to which right reason, aided by rules already established leads.” That standard of justice rested on public opinion, which he defined as follows:
In 1885, he delivered an address before the Virginia State Bar Association, which was afterwards published under the title of The Provinces of the Written and Unwritten Law. In 1890, he addressed the American Bar association on “The Ideal and the Actual in the Law,” which embodied further views on his theory of the origin of law. In his later years he formulated his theories in a series of lectures which he planned to deliver at the Harvard Law School, and which were published posthumously by his executor, Lewis Cass Ledyard, in a book entitled Law: Its Origin Growth and Function.