Book: America’s Lawyer-Presidents: From Law Office to Oval Office

In honor of July 4th, the WSJ Law blog observed yesterday that 25 out of 43 of our nation's Presidents were also lawyers. In this case, we're pleased to say, we beat the WSJ Law blog to the punch by a wide margin, having blogged about this bit of trivia last November in a post entitled: 25 of Our Nation's Presidents Were Lawyers.

What we didn't know, and we learned from the WSJ Law blog post, was that there's actually a book on the subject, America’s Lawyer-Presidents: From Law Office to Oval Office.

We also recently heard from a reader, Professor Leonard Klein, who advised us that our original list was incorrect - he claimed James Madison was not a lawyer and should be deleted from the list, and James Garfield was, and should be added.

We had sourced our original list from this site, which included Madison, but not Garfield.  But we investigated further using Wikipedia and learned that Professor Klein is correct - see entries for James Madison (nothing about being a lawyer) and James Garfield (says he studied law privately and was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1860).

We haven't read the book referenced above - if any JD Bliss reader does, please advise whether it confirms that Garfield was a lawyer, and Madison was not.