Harder for Jewish Lawyers to Earn Living, Survey in New Quarterly Finds

Jewish lawyers find it more difficult than their colleagues to earn a subsistence income, according to a study of the situation in New York City on the basis of 11,400 attorneys believed to be Jewish. The study, prepared by Melvin M. Fagen, executive secretary of the Conference on Jewish Relations, and entitled “Status of Jewish Lawyers in New York City,” appears in the first issue of Jewish Social Studies, quarterly journal of the conference, out today.

Mr. Fagen summarizes the results of his study as follows: “….Jewish lawyers in New York City find it more difficult to earn a subsistence income than do their colleagues in the profession, that proportionately fewer of them earn large incomes, that they enter the profession with less collegiate training and largely from evening law schools and that they are largely confined to the individual practice of law rather than partnership or firm-practice.

“Moreover, the general principal causative factors in their relatively low income status seem to be: (1) The relatively large number of Jewish lawyers recently admitted to the New York bar. (2) The lack of opportunity for beginning the practice of law as a salaried employee. (3) The necessity to prepare for a law career in evening law-schools and without full academic training. (4) Their confinement to the least lucrative types of clientele and fields of law practice.”

The journal is edited by Professors Salo W. Baron, Hans Kohn and Morris R. Cohen, president of the Conference, and contains articles by them, as well as by Prof. Franz Boas, and Joshua Starr, of the American Jewish Congress research staff. A prefatory note declares that “accurate and verifiable information has become a matter of vital necessity, especially in view of the destruction of important centers of Jewish learning in Eastern and Central Europe.”