Stephen Prout Lindsay is an American lawyer who practiced in Boston, Massachusetts, where he was admitted to the bar in 1972 and later became a partner at the law firm Ropes & Gray. A graduate of Yale University and the University of Michigan Law School, his legal work centered on corporate and real estate matters, and he later served as an elected member of the Wellesley Town Meeting.
Background
Stephen Prout Lindsay was born on October 3, 1944, in Niagara Falls, New York, the son of Penn Reuben Lindsay and Gertrude Mary (Prout) Lindsay. Niagara Falls is a city in western New York on the Niagara River, facing the Canadian city of the same name across the border, and its waterfall has long made the region a center of tourism and industry.
He came of age in the postwar United States, when the country's colleges and professional schools were growing to serve a larger number of students. His later education and career took him from the Ivy League to the Midwest and then to Boston, where his legal career would be based.
Education
Lindsay received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 1966. Founded in 1701 in the Connecticut colony, Yale was one of the oldest colleges in the American colonial tradition and by the 1960s was a major university in New Haven, Connecticut.
He then studied at the University of Michigan Law School, where he received his Juris Doctor in 1972. The law school was founded in 1859 and inherited a progressive tradition from Michigan's politics, which had emphasized the abolition of slavery and educational reform. Because Michigan lies beside the Canadian border and the university enrolled international students, the school also developed a strong emphasis on international and comparative law.
At Michigan, Lindsay served as an associate editor of the Michigan Law Review. The journal began publication in 1902 after a student proposed it to the law faculty, and it was first intended as a forum for faculty scholarship. From 1940, when the first student editor-in-chief was selected, student editors were given increasing responsibility, and by the time Lindsay studied there the Review was run without faculty supervision.
Career
Lindsay was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1972, the year he completed his law degree. That year he joined Ropes & Gray in Boston, a firm founded in 1865 in Boston by two Harvard Law School graduates, John Codman Ropes and John Chipman Gray. The firm carried several other names over its history, and by the 1960s it had grown to nearly 75 attorneys.
The firm built practice areas in bankruptcy and labor law during the Great Depression and the New Deal, and its work expanded to securities reporting after the Securities and Exchange Commission was created. Its growth during the 1970s and 1980s was part of a wider expansion of Boston's law firms, which had a substantial role in the city's legal and commercial life.
Lindsay advanced from associate to partner at Ropes & Gray. His practice was in business and corporate law, and his documented work included the development of new or expanded facilities for corporate and institutional clients, commercial mortgage finance for institutional lenders, and matters for real estate developers and a major real estate brokerage firm. He later became a retired partner of the firm.
Alongside his legal career, Lindsay served on the advising committee of the Town of Wellesley, Massachusetts, from 1982 to 1985. From 1984 he served as a town meeting member. Wellesley's Town Meeting is the town's legislative body, made up of 240 elected members from eight precincts, and the moderator appoints citizens to standing committees, including the Advisory Committee.
Politics
No political party affiliation is documented for Lindsay. His documented public office has been local: he served as an elected member of the Wellesley Town Meeting, the legislative body of a Massachusetts town whose government is officially nonpartisan.
Wellesley Town Meeting members are elected by precinct to staggered three-year terms, and the body debates and votes on the town budget, zoning bylaws, and other articles brought before it. Town officials have described its proceedings as intended to be non-partisan and non-adversarial, although national party politics has occasionally influenced local policy debates.
