Dr. Wharton died when George was seven and his only sister Frances a newborn, so the family moved to smaller quarters, 346 S. 16th Street in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood with his grandmother.

He considered Willie Ryder his best friend, noting that he was "colored"; and also remembered informally competing at memory exercises with boys from a nearby prep school.

In addition to academic activities, for which he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key he often twirled later in his life, Pepper started the school newspaper and edited a literary magazine, which later merged into The Daily Pennsylvanian.

In his autobiography, dedicated to "Andrew Hamilton and all other Philadelphia Lawyers Past and Present", Pepper acknowledged that public dissatisfaction with the bar had always existed, but thought it increasing throughout his lifetime.

[4][8] In 1890–1891, he visited Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and studied the case system of instruction being introduced by Dean Christopher C. Langdell, and applied by John Chipman Gray in Property, James Bradley Thayer in Evidence and Constitutional Law, James Barr Ames in Torts, Trusts and Pleading, and Samuel Williston in Contracts.

After World War I, Draper and Elihu Root founded the American Law Institute, with funding from the Carnegie Corporation and George W. Wickersham as its first President.

[16] The earliest case he recounted in his autobiography concerned a bequest to the City of Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin in 1790, which was to fund interest-bearing loans to deserving artisans.

Five decades later, the Orphans Court (which was found to lack jurisdiction in the original case) appointed him Master to determine question under Franklin's will and thus facilitate the administration of the trust which as a youthful advocate he had tried to set aside.

He also found jurors sympathetic to anyone who has acted under provocation, and apt to resent the conduct of the provocateur, and proudly recounted a cross-examination he had made before Judge Mayer Sulzberger.

The Senate refused to recognize Quay's appointment, which eventually reduced his power, although the case led to a friendship between Pepper and Elkins (who had hoped to succeed Stone as Governor, but became a justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania instead).

He was counsel to the National and American League baseball clubs, defeating the application of the Sherman Antitrust Act to their activities in Chicago in 1915 before judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in preliminary injunction case.

However, it was revived four years later after the Black Sox Scandal and his clients received an unfavorable jury verdict, which was reversed by the Supreme Court in Federal Baseball Club v. National League (1922) after lawyer Pepper and Judge Landis (who by then became baseball Commissioner) revised the leagues' organizational structure, Pepper writing the caption for the new series of agreements, "Play Fair.

[25] He concluded his advice for fellow attorneys by quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., "I like your rapture over the law, I only fear that it may be dimmed as you get into the actualities (in the sense of the hard side) of life.

[27] It was initially near his family home, but he and his wife continued their membership after they moved to the Philadelphia Main Line in the 1920s ("Fox Creek Farm" then "Hillhouse" in Devon).

He strongly believed in what fellow Philadelphian Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle called "Athletic Christianity", and continued to work out sculling on the Delaware river into his old age.

He also served on the General Board of Religious Education (GBRE) with bishops Ethelbert Talbot, Chauncey Brewster, David H. Greer, Thomas F. Gailor and Edward L. Parsons, as well as distinguished laymen Nicholas Murray Butler (president of Columbia University) and Robert Hallowell Gardiner III.

However, by 1892, he left the Biddle law office and switched his allegiance to the Republican party,[31] especially the Progressive wing of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

At the request of Henry Stimson, Pepper agreed to represent Gifford Pinchot whose charges of undue favoritism against Taft's Secretary of the interior, Ballinger, had led to a scandal, the Pinchot–Ballinger controversy, as well as congressional hearings.

[32] Despite his admiration for Roosevelt, Pepper supported Taft in 1912, but rebuffed an offer of a judgeship on the United States Circuit Court of Appeals as well as refused to respond to movements that attempted to draft him for mayor of Philadelphia.

[citation needed] During the first World War, Pepper found it difficult to stay "neutral in thought"; despite his German ancestry, he was an unabashed anglophile throughout his life.

[38] Pepper prevailed upon President Calvin Coolidge to name fellow Pennsylvanian Owen Josephus Roberts special counsel to investigate the Teapot Dome scandal of Warren G. Harding's administration.

[38] Pepper also drew national attention for his work (appointed by the Supreme Court) in Myers v. United States, a separation of powers case concerning the president's removal of an official without Congressional assent.

Newly elected Governor John Stuchell Fisher appointed his political ally Joseph Grundy to fill the vacancy, and Pepper returned to his private law practice.

Pepper was one of the counsel in United States v. Butler, in which the Supreme Court declared the Agricultural Adjustment Act unconstitutional, prompting FDR's court-packing plan.

He is buried beside his wife, Charlotte, who died a decade earlier, at St. David's Episcopal Church, Wayne, Pennsylvania, a parish in which their children and grandchildren had become active.