Golden Age.

The plasticity of American law and its strategic position in American cultural life helped to make 1815 to 1850 a period that would be remembered as a golden age of the bar. The most glamorous attorneys of the era were the great advocates of the seaboard cities, including Daniel Webster, William Wirt, Rufus Choate, Horace Binney, and William Pinkney. Their principal stage was the Supreme Court, where crowds packed the galleries to hear their erudite and dramatic performances. The justices and the spectators were both important audiences, for these attorneys not only contributed to judicial decision making but were major figures in a national literature that remained centered on oratory. Webster, the dominant lawyer of his generation, argued numerous cases before the Court, prevailing in such landmark decisions as Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Cohens v. Virginia (1821), and Gibbons v. Ogden...