Before the Massachusetts Bar Association was started in
1910, an attempt at forming a state bar association failed
in 1849. The Massachusetts Bar Association held its first
organizational meeting on Dec. 22, 1909 at the Hotel Somerset in
Boston.
The MBA, which is credited with being one of the first
bar associations to welcome women, admitted its first woman member,
Mary A. Mahan of West Roxbury, in 1913. Portia Law School,
which catered exclusively to teaching women, opened in 1908, but
gains for women in the profession were slow to follow. By 1920,
there were 47 women lawyers out of 4,850 total in
Massachusetts.
For the MBA's third annual meeting, a group of
50 members symbolically recognized the association's statewide
membership by traveling from Boston by "special train." The group
was joined in Worcester, and was finally met in Springfield by a
delegation of the Hampden County Bar. Within five years of its
formation, 33 of the MBA's 55 members practiced law outside of
Boston.
When the MBA was founded, judges in the commonwealth
were not required to be lawyers. Considering the
faultiness of the bench to be detrimental to justice, the MBA
established a standing Committee of Judicial Appointments in 1910
and lobbied against an elective judiciary in order to maintain a
high bench standard.