John Brooks Leavitt

[1] "We have positive evidence, which as soon as New York has an honest District Attorney," Leavitt told a crowd of 2,000 gathered at Long Acre Square on Broadway, "will be laid before him, and we then shall be able to obtain an indictment and send the arch-boss to the jail which yawns for him.

Leavitt subsequently attended high school in Zanesville, Ohio, where his father acted as minister of an Episcopal church after leaving his law practice.

Following his graduation from Columbia, Leavitt began clerking in a New York City law office, and shortly after hung out his shingle as sole practitioner.

Among his targets through the years were the telephone monopoly,[5] fellow attorneys who abused the contingency fee system,[6] the laws regarding the criminally insane, and the need for ballot reform in New York State.

"If an illustration is needed it is to be found in the conduct of directors of corporations, who, when acting as a body, countenance theft, bribery, extortion, tyranny, lawlessness, trickery and fraud, which as individuals each man would abhor....

In one of his polemics, entitled To What Extent Should Insane Persons Be Amenable to Criminal Law?, Leavitt examined the issue of mental illness and legal culpability.

If the jury system were removed, Leavitt told the 18 women who were among the first of their sex to practice law in the city, "in twenty-five years you will have a corrupt judiciary.

In a letter to John Brooks Leavitt of January 26, 1900, for instance, E. L. Godkin told the New York attorney that barring extraordinary events, he was happily removing himself from public service in the face of the greed and corruption of elected officials.

"At the time in question I was under the delusion," Godkin wrote to the reformer Leavitt, "from which I have recovered, that deliverance might come for this City from our respectable classes....

[4] Leavitt served on committees for reform of the Bar Association, where he proposed novel plans including reconstituting the United States Circuit Court of Appeals with a different composition of federal judges.

Ormes B. Keith of Philadelphia, and great-niece of Elias Boudinot, president of the United States Congress at the close of the Revolutionary War.

Mary (Keith) Leavitt died at the couple's home at 1 Lexington Avenue at Gramercy Park in Lower Manhattan on July 3, 1916, at age 59.