One can’t help but notice this. It seems that Esq. has become the standard postnominal for practicing attorneys, used on door shingles, letterheads, and business cards. There’s an obvious practicality there, since “Esq” is much shorter than “Attorney at Law”, leaving more room on the business card and so on.
But how did this happen? It seems to me to have been a recent development, perhaps only with in the last 35 years or so. Years prior to that, I would sometimes sign myself “Esquire” as a joke, calling back to its earlier usage as being applicable to anyone who could reasonably claim the status of a gentleman. According to the older, mostly British custom, it applied to any adult male of the untitled gentry, as well as anyone who had achieved a certain level of educational attainment but wasn’t entitled to any other postnominal. Of course, I wasn’t being serious about it. Among other things, custom dictated that you didn’t call yourself an Esquire; for example, you didn’t put it on your stationery or sign your letters that way. But when people wrote to you, they would put Esquire in the address, following your name.
But back to lawyers. I’m pretty sure the word Esquire wasn’t uttered once during the entire run of Perry Mason, from the late 1950s into the 1960s. For that matter, I think the same can also be said for L.A. Law in the 1980s. But now every attorney’s an Esquire. I’ve even read in Findlaw that a few newly graduated JDs have been disciplined for using “Esq.” prior to passing the bar.
(P.S. I may have asked this here many years ago, but if there’s an earlier thread I can’t find it now.)
In the United States, esquire (often shortened to Esq.) is a title of courtesy, given to a lawyer and commonly appended to his/her surname (e.g., John Smith, Esq. or John Smith, Esquire) when addressing the lawyer in written form. Note that it is traditionally considered a solecism to append Esq. or Esquire to one’s own name.
Here’s a Google Ngram Viewer chart of the words “esquire” and “lawyer” being used together. You can see that, while there was a peak which began around 1980, and topped out around 2000, the two words were fairly consistently used together throughout the 19th and 20th century.
(Lawyers in Canada currently don’t use “Esquire” at all, probably because of the Q.C. as a more preferred postnominal. I have seen “Esquire” used in some older case reports.)
Really? Applying it to yourself seems like a faux pas, but I’m British…
Exactly. To my sensibilities, it would be like calling yourself “The Honorable Mr Smith”. Or in Japanese referring to yourself as Smith-san. In the U.K., it would be a standard way to refer to a someone (any adult male) you are addressing in a formal letter, but not yourself.
As I understand it, you put “John Smith, P.A.” on your stationery. But you may consider yourself insulted if people fail to address you as “John Smith, Esq.”
From 1989 to 1995 I worked at a US college with a fair number of students from Ireland. One day I was in the elevator with a group of people who noted that a poster for a talk by a “Mary Smith Esq” was graffitied with “Ha ha are you a man??” Someone said that it must have been done by an Irish student unfamiliar with the US convention of calling attorneys Esq, whether male or female.
To be fair about it–and I should have acknowledged this–according to the earlier, more generalized usage customs with regard to the title, most if not all attorneys/barristers/solicitors could reasonably claim the title, as others of the same background, but they didn’t have the exclusive customary right to it as they do now.
It seems odd that American lawyers would adopt the title. This is the USA after all, where even in colonial times John Adams made his wife remove their coat of arms from the family carriage as too royalist.
Also, just as some more pre-1980s evidence, here’s a copy of a letter, written by a member of the Harvard Law School, from 1930, to Henry Wise, a lawyer who practiced in the Boston area. You can see that it is addressed to “Henry Wise, Esq.”
I checked the first edition of Black’s Law Dictionary from 1891, and the second from 1910 (both available on Internet Archive) and both had the word “esquire” but did not have any mention of it being used by lawyers. That may suggest that it wasn’t a common usage at the turn of the 19th/20th century?
(The 3rd ed. wasn’t available on the Internet Archive, so I couldn’t check it.)
ETA: building on @Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus 's comment, it may have been commonly used for professionals generally, but not specifically for lawyers yet, so might not have shown up in the Law Dictionary?
I’m sure we had this conversation years ago, but it is actually used more consistently by women who are lawyers. I believe I became popular because it would help avoid awkward situations in which someone assumed that a woman in the room wasn’t a lawyer.
