Number Of Lawyers Research Articles

Law Schools in the 21st Century

In 2000 the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) report Managing Justice contained a review of legal education. The Commission observed that:The size and structure of the profession as it then existed [in the 1970s] promoted a greater degree of cohesion and solidarity. That position has changed very dramatically over the past three decades. The number of lawyers has grown rapidly … specialisation is now a feature of practice, there are very large national and international firms … the number of law schools has nearly quintupled, and the academy mainly comprised of full time academics has a much more attenuated relationship with the practising profession.1This article examines the change in the delivery of law degrees in the last three decades. We note how legal education has moved away from traditional methods of teaching with a heavy emphasis on substantive law, but includes the study and practice of a range of skills and practices designed to provide a broad legal education. We consider the apparent over-supply of law graduates. We conclude that changes to the legal profession in the last 20 years, which include a reduced availability of clerkships, require a re-thinking of the delivery of law degrees. We argue that the law degree of the 21st century should focus on a student centred approach which integrates increased skills components in order to enhance the employability of the graduates for the legal profession and a range of other professions.

Legal Education, Profession and Society Transition: Reform of Lithuanian Legal Education

AbstractThe article explores a specialized perspective of democratization and nation-building in one of the states restored from the former Soviet Union. The focus is on the reform of Lithuanian legal education. It regards the interaction between the two main national law faculties, on the one hand, and society and the profession on the other. There has been a rise in law work and the number of lawyers. Both legal education and the structure of the profession have undergone changes, facilitated by ways of regulation and the allocation of resources. The profession has become an active and necessary vehicle for institutional reform and European integration. The article covers the following areas: (1) the reconstruction of the legal professions and legal education; (2) the role of legal education in a changed society; and (3) a discussion of how law faculties educate lawyers to solve legal problems in a new state. The examination is based mainly on qualitative interviews, the respondents being elite members of the legal profession, students, and citizens engaged in public debate. This is supplemented with an overview of the regulatory framework, university study programs, and a few statistical data. A few comparisons are made to other similar reforms in post-socialist Europe. The conclusion is that the new nation-state has invested considerable regulation and resources into a project of creating a new generation of lawyers, hinged on western constitutional values, taking the Lithuanian heritage back to an earlier tradition of the normative values of law. Professional forums have been created, as well as professional debate over legal education and other professional issues. However, the project does not seem to have reached its goal. Members of the legal profession voices concern about the ability of the traditionally most prestigious law faculty to bring about the required changes of its performance. On the one hand, in pointing out the weaknesses, the profession renders a practical example of having established an open professional community debating professional issues, among them legal education. They take standpoints independent of the political level. On the other hand, the examination also indicates a lacking ability to deal with some general malfunctions. The most important one is that the community habors considerable mistrust which curbs responsiveness to suggestions from other professionals, not to mention willingness to listen to criticism. This makes it extremely diffi cult to deal in practical terms with a number of issues, such as how to safeguard a level of professionalization of law work, creating standards that can be benchmarked with other international systems, getting on with the disposal of repressive law remains, and securing independent law professors with relevant and adequate academic standing in their field.

Law as a Character of Society: Legal Change in Twentieth-Century America

In 1976, Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, wrote an essay, Perspective of Literature, for a bicentennial volume on American law. His theme was what American literature has to contribute to our understanding of law. Why, Ellison asked, were there so few lawyers and judges as characters in American literature? Wasn't that lack particularly surprising given the importance of to American society-given that the United States' foundational documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were about law? Ellison concluded: law ensures the conditions, the stage upon which we act; the rest is up to us.' It was a wonderful statement-particularly revealing for the author of a novel that emphasized the struggle of the individual to be seen as a person, rather than as a member of a despised group. But is law's role that limited? Does set only the stage? Friedman's magisterial work allows us to evaluate Ellison's statement and to assess what it means to write the history of law. How does one write-or even conceptualize-a history of American in the last century? The problems seem so large as to be almost overwhelming. What is law-one wonders even what that word means-and how does it relate to American culture? Those questions underlie Lawrence Friedman's masterpiece. His encyclopedic work retells the major changes in American in the twentieth century-ranging from civil rights, business law, government regulation of business, and criminal to legal thought. At the same time he links those changes to shifting societal attitudes, wrought by such events as the world wars, the Great Depression, and the civil rights movement. So this becomes not just a history of American law-it becomes a history of America, measured by legal changes. Friedman has several meta-themes that provide the framework for explorations of American history: growth of the administrative state at the state and local level; centralization of law-making and enforcement from the states to the federal government; growth in amount of law, number of lawyers and

Rawls in France

The reception of Rawls in France has been an extremely complex story where forces of innovation have been, in the end, overwhelmed by the resistance of `philosophical nationalism'. This is surprising as, in many ways, France was going through tremendous changes and modernization at the time of the translation of A Theory of Justice in 1987. In that context, Rawls's project seemed to have something useful and suggestive to offer: bridging the gap between freedom and equality in a new version of social democracy, combining social justice and market efficiency, respecting the plurality of values within civil society and creating a consensus on democratic legitimacy. But the intellectual obstacles, represented mostly by the French idiosyncratic brand of republicanism, were to prove too strong to allow for a true `liberalization' of French intellectual and political life. Whereas a number of lawyers, economists and political scientists as well as proportion of the French civil service saw all the benefits of a rigorous engagement with Rawls, philosophers and the intelligentsia on the whole, with the exception of Paul Ricoeur, reacted negatively to Rawls.

Making Good Law Requires More Lawyers

While we lawyers largely think of ourselves as people who “practice” law, the fact is that we “make” law regularly during the course of our work. Lawyers and judges do this by interpreting statutes, resolving litigation, and forging common law as a matter of course. Lawyers also make law in a rather different setting. Legislative bodies at all levels of government have long been places where the voters sent lawyers to represent them in much greater proportion than the number of lawyers in the population. The contribution of lawyers to legislative deliberations has been a good and important one for the whole of society. We are in danger of losing it.

"Zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes. ..": "Rassenschandegesetze" im Nationalsozialismus (review)

Reviewed by: “Zum Schutz des deutschen Blutes . . .”: “Rassenschandegesetze” im National sozialismus Helmut Berding “Zum Schutz des deutschen Blutes...”: “Rassenschandegesetze” im National sozialismus, by Michael Ley. Bodenheim bei Mainz: Philo Verlag, 1997. 348 pp. 28 DM. After their seizure of power the National Socialists attempted to distance the Jews as quickly as possible from the economic, political, and cultural life in Germany. The first measures were instituted in early 1933 and expanded quickly. With the Nuremberg racial laws of September 15, 1935 Nazi Jewish policy reached a new level. The number of lawyers who participated in the anti-Jewish legislation and jurisdiction increased. Their cooperation with the “race-denigrating laws” stands at the center of this study by Michael Ley. The political-religious background of the Nuremberg Laws is first addressed; next the juridical and social environment of the racial-political legislation; and, finally the study turns to the question of how the administration of justice in the post-war period came to grips with its own past. The first part of the study sheds light on the “blood- and race-denigrating processes” in the context of National Socialist sacred theology (“Heilstheologie”). In clarifying the thesis the author, in several cases, draws connections to canon law. The ensuing section on the spiritual straying of the National Socialist legal system emphasizes the central role of Hegelian legal philosophy. Helmut Berding Historical Institute University of Gießen translated by Dean Bell Copyright © 2001 The University of Nebraska

Malpractice: provider risk or consumer protection?

The National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) began operation in September 1990 as a clearinghouse for adverse action, licensure, and malpractice information in an effort to protect consumers and promote quality in health care. This study analyzed 66,107 and 1291 records of payments made for 50,396 physicians and 1218 nurses, respectively, from 1994 through 1998, to describe characteristics, trends, and risk factors of malpractice payment for physicians and nurses. The median payments, more often settlements paid by insurance companies than judgments in courts of law, were higher for physicians than for nurses. Mean payments were higher for residents than for non-resident physicians; median payments for residents were slightly lower than other physicians when adjusted for number of providers included in the payment. On the state level, correlation analyses suggested a significant positive association between the nurse rate of malpractice payments that were made and median per capita income, number of physicians per 1000 residents, and number of attorneys per 1000 residents; analysis revealed a significant negative association between this rate and the percentage of residents residing in rural areas and the number of nurses per 1000 residents. Although findings suggested that payment trends remained stable, there was great regional variation in the risk of malpractice payment for both physicians and nurses. The physician risk ranged from a low of 0.73% per physician per year in Alabama to a high of 3.7% in Wyoming, and the nurse risk ranged from a low of 0% per nurse per year in Vermont to a high of 0.075% in the District of Columbia. If the quality of health care provided by physicians and nurses does not vary geographically in the United States, then such a great discrepancy seems to challenge the notion that the risk of malpractice litigation consistently promotes the quality of health care.

Lawyers' Roles in Voluntary Associations: Declining Social Capital?

The extent and nature of lawyers' participation in civic life probably has important effects on the character of the community's activity and its outcomes. Where and how lawyers participate in voluntary associations may influence the ability of those organizations to function within the larger structure of American institutions. This paper compares findings from two surveys of Chicago lawyers, the first conducted in 1975 and the second in 1994-95. Contrary to some expectations, the available evidence does not suggest that community activities of lawyers decreased. Moreover, lawyers' energies in 1995 appear to have been devoted more often to socially concerned organizations, those with a reformist agenda, than had been the case in 1975. The types of organizations with the greatest increase in activity were religious and civic associations. A smaller percentage of the respondents held leadership positions in 1995 than in 1975, but, because of a doubling in the number of lawyers, the best estimate is that the bar's absolute level of contribution to community leadership did not change greatly. In both 1975 and 1995, a hierarchy of social prestige appears to have influenced the pattern of lawyers' community activities. Lawyers who had higher incomes, were middle-aged, were Protestants, and who had attended elite law schools were more likely to be active or leaders in most kinds of organizations. In ethnic and fraternal organizations, however, the elites of the profession had relatively low rates of participation, while government lawyers, solo practitioners, and graduates of less prestigious law schools predominated. Status hierarchies within the broader community—as well as social differences in taste, preference, or “culture”—clearly penetrate the bar.

Evaluating the technical efficiency of large US law firms

We conduct a performance evaluation in terms of technical efficiency of large law firms based on a unique sample of 163 large law firms in the USA in 1994. To estimate technical efficiency for individual firms, we use the stochastic frontier production function with composed errors where output (measured in terms of revenue) is a function of various labour and human capital inputs. Based on the sample, the average level of technical efficiency in the production of legal service in large US law firms is estimated at 82.20%. More than 87% of the firms attained 75% or higher level of technical efficiency. The estimation results also indicate that the number of lawyers, the number of paralegals, and the number of associates per partner, have a positive and statistically significant effect on the production of legal service.

The nature and consequences of lawyers’market regulation in Japan

In Japan, the lawyers’market is regulated so strictly that the contrast between the small lawyers’market and the huge economy is surprising. The number of lawyers is about 15,000, while the GDP and population are $4 trillion and 130 million, respectively. The regulation is governed principally by the Supreme Court of Japan and the Ministry of Justice. Regulations are implemented mainly through (1) strict bar examinations and (2) long trial times. The pass rates of the exam are 2–4% each year, and the average trial time (civil cases and District Courts) is 19.2 months. The consequences of the regulation are that (1) consumers pay 13.9‐100.0% higher prices than in countries with no regulation, and (2) the expected rate of return on human capital investment in lawyers is very low, around the 0% level. It is not only a great loss for Japanese economy but also very unfortunate for university students that the investment opportunity in this most respected profession is almost blocked.

Agreements to Waive or to Arbitrate Legal Claims: An Economic Analysis

As arbitration agreements have grown in use, they have become controversial, with many critics describing them as a disguised form of waiver. This paper presents an economic analysis of waiver and arbitration agreements and applies this analysis to the evolving arbitration case law in the Supreme Court and elsewhere. The paper examines the conditions under which parties have an incentive to enter into these types of agreement, and their welfare implications. It shows that, if parties are well informed, they will enter into waiver agreements when and only when litigation is socially undesirable, in the sense that the deterrence benefits provided by the threat of litigation fall short of litigation costs. Under similar conditions, they will enter into arbitration agreements when and only when the margin between deterrence benefits and dispute resolution costs is larger under the arbitral regime. These results suggest a presumption in favor of enforcing these agreements, especially where parties are informed. Exceptions to this presumption largely should be based on informational disparities. The theory developed in the paper is used to critically examine arguments against arbitration contracts, such as the claim that these agreements inhibit the development of new law, and to suggest a positive theory of the case law. Although the focus here is on waiver and arbitration agreements, the analysis has broader implications for the literature on the social desirability of litigation. The key implication is that the answer to socially undesirable litigation is not a wholesale reduction in the amount of litigation or the number of lawyers, but an expansion of markets in waiver and arbitration agreements.

Is the Tort System in Crisis? New Empirical Evidence

While journalists and politicians decry increasing tort liability, scholars have long questioned the existence of a tort crisis. This article uses a particularly comprehensive database and multivariate analysis to examine product liability and medical malpractice jury verdicts in a representative urban county over a recent 12-year period. Including variables such as injury severity, gender, type of alleged fault, trial length, number of lawyers, and number of expert witnesses, the study offers a comprehensive review of these verdicts. Among other findings, the study shows that (1) plaintiff win rates were low; (2) compensatory damages were modest; (3) punitive damages were nonexistent; (4) both win rates and verdict size declined between 1985 and 1996; (5) gender of parties, lawyers, and trial judge correlated significantly with some outcomes; and (6) obtaining a full census of verdicts was essential to the study's success because commercial verdict reporters were both underinclusive and biased toward pro-plaintiff verdicts.

Investigations into White‐Collar Offences and the ‘Sick Man’ of France

In England and Wales the Crown Prosecutor is a lawyer who is independent from the investigation and is charged with assessing evidence and evaluating whether a prosecution should proceed or not. The CPS is intentionally authorised to override the decisions of the police to curb any potentially over‐zealous investigations and evidence gathering that might subsequently tarnish the standards of procedure in the courts when applying the criminal law. The increasingly burdensome rules of disclosure have made demands on the CPS which are akin to the overall requirement on the investigating magistrate of civil law jurisdictions to find the truth by examination of the prosecution and defence evidence. The recent moves to return a limited number of lawyers to police stations is a further indication that the future role of the CPS may include an active rather than solely passive role in evidence gathering. The Serious Fraud Office are directly involved in the investigation and prosecution of complex frauds. This office has statutory and judicial authority to conduct investigations which follow an inquisitorial rather than accusatorial model. The juge d'instruction in France has authority to direct and control police investigations and subsequently to compile a dossier of evidence for presentation before a trial court. This paper points out that there are close parallels emerging in pre‐trial procedures in England and Wales and in France and the criticisms of the role of the investigating magistrate, the ‘sick man’, may hold lessons to be learnt for investigators and prosecutors within this jurisdiction.

Does Lawyer Advertising Adversely Influence the Image of Lawyers in the United States? An Alternative Perspective and New Empirical Evidence

Abstract Using multiple regression analysis, this study investigates the impact of lawyer advertising on the public's image of the law profession. The analysis, which includes variables to reflect per capita real outlays on lawyer advertising, the public's image of politicians, long‐term trends in the image of lawyers, the per capita number of lawyers, the per capita number of civil suits commenced in U.S. district courts, and the divorce rate, finds that lawyer advertising raises the public's esteem for the law profession. Moreover, causality tests supplementing the regression estimation reinforce this conclusion while revealing a bidirectional relationship between lawyer advertising and lawyer image.

Profit and the practice of law: what's happened to the legal profession

Since 1960, powerful and influential law firms in America have shifted from professional service organizations to profit-oriented businesses. To explain how and why this transformation has occurred and how it has affected both lawyers and clients, Profit and the Practice of Law examines the histories of the eight largest firms in Atlanta, Georgia, and similar firms around the country. Over the past thirty-six years, the number of lawyers in the United States has risen more than 225 percent, large law firms have grown by more than 700 percent, and compensation has increased greatly in excess of inflation. Ironically, as these firms have prospered, their lawyers have become unhappier and more dissatisfied, and the public has become more distrustful and disdainful of them. Profit and the Practice of Law discusses possible remedies for this malaise and what can be done to reduce the cost of legal services and to reform the practice of law for the benefit of clients, lawyers, and the community as a whole.

Superfund Manual : Legal and Management Strategies

Review: Superfund Manual: Legal and Management Strategies By Crowell & Moring Reviewed by Kathy Shimpock-Vieweg Muchmore & Wallwork, P.C. Crowell & Moring. Superfund Manual: Legal and Management Strategies. 5th ed. Rockville, MD: Government Institutes, Inc., 1995. 468 pp. US $95.00 paper ISBN: 0-86587-344-5. Superfund, otherwise known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), is a hastily enacted, complex piece of legislation that attempts to address the release of hazardous substances into the environment. Since its enactment in 1980, it has been the subject of massive litigation, regulation, and amendments in an attempt to clarify its meaning. Superfund Manual is a resource designed to aid researchers in understanding CERCLA. Written by a number of attorneys at the Washington D.C. law firm of Crowell & Moring, it covers a wide range of issues, from hazardous substance release reporting and governmental response authority, to various strategies for potentially responsible parties (PRPs). Written in clear prose and making use of extensive annotations, Superfund Manual offers an excellent overview for business people, environmentalists and lawyers. The actual text of the CERCLA/Superfund law as amended through 1992 is included. The manual is flawed however, by the lack of an index and the omission of a table of acronyms. Because the law in this area is cluttered with acronyms, the inclusion of some type of guide would have been helpful. A more critical problem is the book's physical format. Rapidly changing laws are not easily reflected in a paperback book. Most legal publications are issued in loose-leaf format, or provide for pocket-part updates to accommodate revisions. As a one volume publication, Superfund Manual offers no such mechanism for revision. In spite of these flaws and because of its comprehensive scope and readable text, I nevertheless recommend Superfund Manual to anyone needing an overview of Superfund law.

Lawyers in distress

A significant number of lawyers experience such a high level of distress at work that it damages their physical and mental health, as well as their ability to represent clients. This article introduces a conceptual model designed to understand, evaluate and improve the condition of lawyers through a multidisciplinary approach that involves the expertise of both legal and mental health researchers. The model is used as a framework for a literature review on what is known about the stressors that affect lawyers and for an examination of the consequences that such stressors have on lawyers, litigants and the legal system. In addition, a number of individual and systemic intervention strategies are proposed to prevent, reduce and treat distress among lawyers.

Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944.

Foreword, by Justice Thurgood Marshall Preface Introduction Chapter 1 Black Students in White Law Schools and the Black Law Schools Chapter 2 New England: The Genesis of the Black Lawyer Chapter 3 The Atlantic States Chapter 4 The Southeastern States Chapter 5 The Southern States Chapter 6 The Southwestern States Chapter 7 The Northeastern States Chapter 8 The Northwestern States Chapter 9 The Pacific States Chapter 10 National White and Black Bar Groups and the State Black Bar Groups Appendix 1. The First Black Lawyers, 1844-1944 Appendix 2. U.S. Census: The Number of Lawyers in Each State/Territory by Race and Sex, 1850-1940 Bibliography Table of Cases Index

The Propensity of State Legislatures to License Interior Designers

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study is to identify variables to be used in creating a licensing propensity model that would predict the likelihood that state legislatures will regulate the occupation of interior design. RESEARCH DESIGN: The history of occupational licensing and licensing of interior designers was reviewed to explore what has happened in the past and where the issue stands today. The review of the literature identified ten variables to be considered for the model. Data were acquired from primary sources, government sources, and professional associations. ANALYSIS: Frequencies, chi–squares, t–tests, and logistic regression analysis were performed on the variables, using the statistical package SPSS. KEY FINDINGS: Analysis of the data indicated that two variables, the number of lawyers in a state legislature and the ratio of interior designers to the population of a state, were significant. Results indicated that these variables accurately predicted 73% of the cases in the criterion variable, the presence or absence of licensure of interior designers in a state in those states that have addressed the issue. CONCLUSIONS: Since the key findings suggest that licensing legislation is essentially driven by demand, interior designers should study and develop an understanding of politics and the political process. Not only would this benefit them in their efforts to gain licensure but it would make them better citizens who are not afraid of seeking change in government and its regulations.

Power and Punishment in Scott's Novels (review)

290 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:3 Bruce Beiderwell. Power andPunishment in Scott's Novels. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992. xiii + 156pp. US$30.00. ISBN 0-8203-13513 . When Janet Adam Smith wrote an essay in the Times Literary Supplement on Redgauntlet to mark the Scott bicentenary in 1971, she subtitled it "The Man ofLaw's Tale," an epithet that could be applied to almost any of the Waverley novels, given the frequent presence of lawyers or of plot strategies that tum on issues of legality orjustice. Scott was, of course, born to the law—the son of a Writer-to-the-Signet, apprenticed as a solicitor at the age of fourteen, subsequently an advocate, then Clerk to the Court of Session in Edinburgh, and Sheriff, or chief magistrate, of the county of Selkirk. While a number of lawyers have written interestingly about legal points in Scott's fiction and most literary critics make passing reference to the law in discussing the Waverley novels, there has been no fullscale attempt to examine both the thematic and narratological dimensions of this topic until the publication of Bruce Beiderwell's thoughtful and informative survey. The great strengths of Beiderwell's study derive from his responsiveness to alt aspects of Scott's own fascination with the law together with his detailed knowledge of the legal debates that were current at the time the Waverley novels were being composed— an especially "active and vital period in the history of criminal law reform" (p. vii). Beiderwell's focus is not on the law of property or equity—the area that occupied Scott's day-to-day attention in the division of the Court of Session in which he served as Clerk— but on penal questions and on the criminal law seen in relation to larger issues of justice and power. Beiderwell has a learned but deft way of presenting key aspects of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century philosophical and legal debate about crime and its punishment, so that Scott's fiction is situated within the context of familiar texts by Hobbes and Locke on the one hand and of less familiar writings by Gilbert Stuart or Cesare Beccaria on the other. Readers with a mainly literary background are put comfortably in possession of the necessary theoretical and philosophical material without being subjected to any gratuitous display of the monograph writer's superior learning. With little time or space wasted, Beiderwell is able to show how, for example, understanding of Waverley is enhanced by setting it not only against Locke's Second Treatise but also against the views of William Paley and Martin Madan or the efforts of Samuel Romilly to enact some of Bentham's thinking in legislative form. The Heart of Midlothian is similarly illuminated by reference to Hegel and Kant, as well as to various Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, the necessary citations being managed with incisiveness and economy, not to mention a sharp-eyed ability to discriminate the genuinely pertinent from the merely impressive. In selecting examples for detailed study Beiderwell draws attention to two distinct groups: early novels whose narrative mode is essentially realistic—Waverley, Old Mortality , Rob Roy, and The Heart ofMidlothian—and a series of texts from the 1 820s whose dominant mode is that of romance—Ivanhoe, The Talisman, and, more controversially, Redgauntlet. He sees the early group as reflecting Scott's attempts to grapple directly with the kind of philosophical and practical issues that occupied the attention of legal reformers in the preceding decades and in his own day. The later novels, on the other hand, are seen as exhibiting a different kind of impulse, what Beiderwell characterizes as "a profound desire to make fiction correspond to wishes" (p. ix). It is in the discussion of this second group that the study is at its most innovative, demonstrating how concerns familiar from the early novels—the social containment of wrongdoing, the relationship between punishment, deterrence, and retribution, the difficulty of vindicating innocence—are translated into romance terms, enabling the man of law as narrator to deploy poetic justice to transcend the clumsier and less effective workings of that ordinary REVIEWS 291 human justice which expresses...