[12] After graduating from Harvard, he was admitted to the bar in New York in 1872 and began practicing, with an office at 45 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan.

[13] Fox was considered a leader of the New York bar for sixty years, and was a close friend and contemporary of Elihu Root (a U.S.

[14] In October 1894, upon the retirement of Chief Justice Robert Earl, he was offered the Democratic nomination for Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, but declined.

[15] From 1895 to 1896, he was asked by John R. Fellows to be the special assistant District Attorney in the prosecution of police officials following the Lexow Committee investigation.

In 1897, he was the Citizens Union nominee for New York County District Attorney, in the so-called "Low campaign",[16] however, Democrat Asa Bird Gardiner was elected but later removed from office by then Governor Theodore Roosevelt.

[17] In January 1899, Governor Roosevelt appointed Fox special counsel to assist Attorney General John C. Davies in the investigation of charges against George W. Aldridge, the former Commissioner of Public Works and Campbell W. Adams, the former State Engineer, in connection with the deepening of the Erie Canal under what became known as the "Nine Million Dollar Act.

Dressed in his finest evening clothes and a silk top hat, Fox presented the desk sergeant with arrest warrants for the proprietors of eight different gambling parlors and brothels.

The arrival of Fox and his colleagues in the Tenderloin, traipsing around in the opera clothes accompanied by policeman, drew the attention of the neighborhood's denizens, who followed these strange pairs on their rounds.

On the tenth anniversary of the passage of Volstead Act he warned of a 'spirit of revolt abroad' and counseled President Hoover to 'beware lest it be carried into revolution.