American Bar Association
American association of lawyers
The American Bar Association (ABA) is a voluntary national bar association of lawyers and law students in the United States, and not specific to any single jurisdiction. Founded in 1878, the ABA's stated activities are the setting of academic standards for law schools, and the formulation of model ethical codes related to the legal profession. As of fiscal year 2017, the ABA had 194,000 dues-paying members, constituting approximately 24.4% of American attorneys. In 1979, half of all lawyers in the U.S. were members of the ABA. In 2016, about one third of the 1.3 million practicing lawyers in the U.S. were included in the ABA membership of 400,000, with figures largely unchanged in 2024; Included are "about 150,000 paying members" for 2024–2025, according to Reuters.
The organization's national headquarters are in Chicago, Illinois, with a branch office in Washington, D.C.. The association is affiliated with the law, legal, and professional research sponsoring organization the American Bar Foundation.
History
The ABA was founded on August 21, 1878, in Saratoga Springs, New York, by 75 lawyers from 20 states and the District of Columbia. According to the ABA website:
The legal profession as we know it today barely existed at that time. Lawyers were generally sole practitioners who trained under a system of apprenticeship. There was no national code of ethics; there was no national organization to serve as a forum for discussion of the increasingly intricate issues involved in legal practice.
“American Bar Association” enters the record as american association of lawyers. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what American, Association and association can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“American Bar Association” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, American, Association and association provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q463465. VIAF identifies the subject as 143905371. The Library of Congress control number is n78083441. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1878, 2017, 1979 and 2016.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “American Bar Association”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow American Bar Association primary sources, American Bar Association archive and American research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “American Bar Association”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “American Bar Association” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.