Building Practices: Lawyers

P UBLIC ESTABLISHMENTS – coffee houses, inns and taverns – were important places where people met and did business. The job of the keeper of a house was in part to create an environment where other forms of business could take place, which helps explain why particular houses became associated with specific groups and activities. Chapter 2 demonstrated how the Grecian was an important site for law students, but Irish migrants congregated in other establishments too. Lawyers went to coffee houses, inns and taverns to advance their careers and found that consistent face to face interaction with other Irish people in these places led to familiarity and the development of close ties. The chapters in this section follow-up on the relationships students initiated at the Inns of Court by examining the careers of these practicing lawyers. By negotiating professional and personal interests at work and home, lawyers contributed to the formation and reproduction of Irish communities. These chapters employ the term ‘building practices’ in two ways: first to show what lawyers actually did in terms of work and how they built up their establishments; and second to illustrate how practices of using Irish connections to facilitate business interests were inextricably wrapped up with the production and maintenance of social relationships. Irish lawyers earned their livings by performing various professional services for a range of different clients, yet their involvement in Irish cases is particularly striking. Irish business promoted association between lawyers and their Irish clients, and helped foster relationships with other lawyers, students and professionals. The title of Chapter 3, ‘Working Relationships’, signals a discussion of business, but also of the organization and use of social connections. Business relationships worked because the people involved, invested meanings in those connections that went beyond purely materialistic concerns. Business was a catalyst that brought Irish migrants together, but it was the animation of personal ties that made Irish business possible in the first place. Lawyers acted as brokers between different parties and as this chapter argues, success in that role depended upon the practitioner's access to broader sets of connections. If work was one important venue for lawyers, home was another. Chapter 4 examines the life and career of William Hickey, whose memoirs are a unique source that illuminates the geography of interconnected spaces where middleclass migrants made and remade Irish connections.