The Adventures of the New York State Bar Association
3.18.2026
The founding of the New York State Bar Association 150 years ago came alongside a host of notable events. The United States celebrated its 100th birthday that year, yet scarcely a decade before it was unclear whether the nation would survive. That same year, to secure a victory for Rutherford B. Hayes in the election of 1876, the Republican platform called for the withdrawal of federal troops protecting African Americans in the South, ultimately facilitating not just Hayes’s inauguration, but also the Klan’s campaign of murder and terror. Also in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell spoke the world’s first telephone message: “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you”; Melvil Dewey published his eponymous decimal system; Custer had his last stand at Little Big Horn; Wyatt Earp took a job in Dodge City; the first transcontinental train traveled from New York to San Francisco; Boss Tweed was captured in Spain and returned to prison in New York; and Heinz ketchup and Budweiser beer debuted.
When NYSBA was founded in 1876, it adopted a mission statement:
“[T]o promote reform in the law, to facilitate the administration of justice, to elevate the standard of integrity, honor and courtesy in the legal profession, and to cherish a spirit of brotherhood among the members.”
That mission statement is quite general, but also in 1876, someone else published a detailed guide for NYSBA to follow over the next 150 years. Even though the guide’s author was famous, NYSBA was not quick to recognize it as its instruction manual. The work’s title may have thrown NYSBA’s members off: the manual was called The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by, of course, Mark Twain.
You may scoff at the notion that Tom Sawyer was NYSBA’s guide through 150 years of history, but Twain himself, in the preface, explained that the book was not just “for the entertainment of boys and girls,” but also “to pleasantly remind adults … what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.” Twain’s point, in highlighting those queer enterprises, was to urge change. Let me give you just a few examples to convince the scoffers among you. One of the climaxes of the novel is the trial of Muff Potter – the town drunk who is charged with a murder he did not commit. The townspeople are eager for his conviction because they believe him to be “the bloodiest-looking villain in this country, and they wonder he wasn’t ever hung before,” even offering that “if he was to get free they’d lynch him.” Muff Potter is saved not by the rule of law or the procedural protections we now take for granted, but because Tom and Huck Finn know him to be “kind of good” – someone who stands by them when they are out of luck – and therefore Tom decides to testify to clear Potter even though he believes he is signing his own death warrant.
Over the past 150 years, NYSBA has been at the forefront of promoting the rule of law and advancing the fairness of the criminal justice system. People like Muff Potter are now protected by the right to counsel even if the defendant cannot afford one, Miranda warnings and the exclusionary rule, the Molineux rule, and numerous other constitutional protections. True to Twain’s concern for the fairness of court proceedings and to its mission, NYSBA was instrumental in securing passage of legislation in 2017 that expanded full state funding of indigent criminal defense services from a five-county region to all of the state’s 62 counties, and simultaneously helped block a proposal to defund the Legal Services Corporation.
Next, if we move back to the beginning of the story, we immediately learn that Tom and his half-brother, Sid, live not with a parent, but with their Aunt Polly, who, in the very first pages of the novel, is attempting to administer a beating to Tom. Tom is also regularly beaten by the schoolmaster (in one instance for the mere act of talking to Huckleberry Finn on the way to school). Eventually, he and Huck and Joe Harper, tired of such treatment, run off to pretend to be pirates. When the boys are missing and presumed dead, Aunt Polly and Joe’s mother both realize that Tom “wasn’t any more responsible than a colt,” and that the beatings administered to Tom and Joe were abusive. When the boys arrive unharmed near the conclusion of their own funeral service, the adults “threw themselves upon their restored ones, smother[ing] them with kisses.” No one was there for Huck, but Tom grabbed him as he tried to slink away, and said “Aunt Polly, it ain’t fair. Somebody’s got to be glad to see Huck.”
The law’s treatment of children has advanced greatly since 1876; as Aunt Polly explained, children cannot be held to the same level of culpability and responsibility as can adults. Children can, as in the case of both Tom and Huck, come from homes where the parents are not to be found, or in Huck’s case, where an alcoholic father lacks the ability to care for him. And as Tom explained, the rest of us have a duty to care for children whose parents or other adult caregivers are unavailable, physically or emotionally. NYSBA has always prioritized advocating for a justice system worthy of New York’s families, including by championing reforms that the state has adopted – including increasing pay for 18-B attorneys and family court judgeships to help reduce backlogs – and reforms still yet to be realized – such as mandated parental representation. Recognizing, too, that women like Aunt Polly contribute as much or more to our society than do men (who, in Tom’s and Sid’s cases are completely absent, and in Huck’s case completely unable to support his son), Governor David B. Hill, while he was also NYSBA’s president, signed legislation in 1886 permitting women to become lawyers. And, finally, NYSBA has long been supportive of our treatment courts, so that people once written off as “drunkards,” like Muff Potter and Huck’s father, have a prospect of court-aided recovery and reintegration as productive members of society.
Finally, when Becky Thatcher, with whom Tom is having a quarrel, accidentally tears a page in the schoolmaster’s book she has surreptitiously taken, Becky believes she will be whipped for the first time in her life. Tom, who had already been whipped that morning for spilling ink, does something no student had ever done: he volunteers that he was responsible – even though, in this case, he was not. Though “he took without an outcry the most merciless flaying that [the schoolmaster] had ever administered,” the gratitude that “shone upon him out of poor Becky’s eyes seemed pay enough for a hundred floggings,” and as he went to bed his thoughts of vengeance against the schoolteacher gave way “to pleasanter musings.”
Twain reminds us that doing good for others – even those who have transgressed, and even at personal cost – brings a unique type of satisfaction and fulfillment. That is the same sort of fulfillment lawyers achieve through pro bono work – the selfless devotion of time, expertise and resources to help the helpless. Both through its recruitment and organization of volunteer pro bono attorneys and through its philanthropic arm, the New York Bar Foundation, which just celebrated its 75th anniversary, NYSBA has provided vital legal representation to people in desperate need who could not afford to hire a lawyer.
Simultaneously, Twain reminds us that even those who have been wronged, as Tom was by Becky’s “treachery,” can, by acting with the consequences for others in mind, engage in “noble” acts that quell the thirst for vengeance and, instead, focus on what will improve the present and future for all. NYSBA has similarly prioritized restoration over retribution in its policy objectives – for instance, in its recent endorsement of the then-pending, now-enacted Clean Slate and Raise the Age Acts.
Just as Mark Twain wrote a guidebook for NYSBA’s first 150 years, some author in 2026 is perhaps toiling away to write one for the next 150. Twain described Tom Sawyer as “strictly a history of a boy … the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man.”
In 1876, NYSBA was newborn, its infancy and childhood still ahead of it. Now, as a full-grown institution, should no author in 2026 provide a roadmap for the next 150 years, NYSBA might turn to Twain’s sequel for an instructive tale about two young men, both poor, one white and one Black, rafting down a river together, following the river’s current and leaving behind the prevailing rules, written and unwritten, that had subjugated both. By traveling together, Huck comes to understand and value Jim’s humanity and moral compass, even deciding that it would be better for him to “go to hell” than to betray Jim. That, and other lessons from Huckleberry Finn, might be a good enough navigation chart to guide NYSBA as it leads and supports us over the next 150 years.
The Hon. Rowan D. Wilson is Chief Judge of the State of New York and the New York Court of Appeals. He was previously an Associate Judge to the Court of Appeals from 2017 to 2023. From 1992 to 2017, he was a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City.