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How do lawyers resolve ethical dilemmas in the everyday context of their practice? What are the issues that commonly arise, and how do lawyers determine the best ways to resolve them? Until recently, efforts to answer these questions have focused primarily on rules and legal doctrine rather than the real-life situations lawyers face in legal practice. The first book to present empirical research on ethical decision making in a variety of practice contexts, including corporate litigation, securities, immigration, and divorce law, Lawyers in Practice fills a substantial gap in the existing literature. Following an introduction emphasizing the increasing importance of understanding context in t...
Unhappy clients bring thousands of legal malpractice claims every year, against mega law firms and solo practitioners, for simple errors or egregious misconduct, and for losses than can reach $100 million or more. This in an industry, legal services, generating nearly $300 billion a year in revenue and touching every facet of American society. Yet, scant if any scholarly attention has been paid to the questions and consequences of lawyers' professional liability. This book is the first to fully explore the mistakes lawyers sometimes make, the nature of these mistakes, the harm they do, and the significant disparities in outcomes for corporate and individual victims of lawyers' errors. A syst...
Rebecca Haw Allensworth pries open the inner workings of professional licensing boards, showing how they erect arbitrary barriers to work, corruptly influence markets for routine services such as hairdressing, and tolerate bad actors in high-stakes arenas like medicine and law. The Licensing Racket is a call for reform and, where needed, abolition.
Who should be allowed to provide legal services to others? What characteristics must these services possess? Through a comparative study of English-speaking jurisdictions, this book illuminates the policy choices involved in legal services regulation a
Private Lawyers and the Public Interest: The Evolving Role of Pro Bono in the Legal Profession explores timely questions about the role of pro bono in the legal profession, the relationship between pro bono ideals and pro bono in practice, and the opportunities and limitations of pro bono in expanding access to justice. The contributing writers explore theoretical, empirical, and practical questions regarding the role of pro bono and public service in the legal profession and in law schools. The research presented not only highlights the increase in pro bono efforts across the legal profession but critically examines the limitations of pro bono work, as well as the potential problems such work may pose to the ideal of achieving greater access to justice.
As Deborah L. Rhode explains in this wide-ranging work, the American public has long insisted on the central importance of character, but has failed to adequately nurture and sustain it in families, schools, law, and politics. All too often, our understandings of character are out of step with psychological research and fundamental values.
This book is about the role of lawyers in constructing a just society. Its central objective is to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between lawyers' commercial aims and public aspirations. Drawing on interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives, it explores whether lawyers can transcend self-interest to meaningfully contribute to systems of political accountability, ethical advocacy and distributional fairness. Its contributors, some of the world's leading scholars of the legal profession, offer evidence that although justice is possible, it is never complete. Ultimately, how much - and what type of - justice prevails depends on how lawyers respond to, and reshape, the political and economic conditions in which they practise. As the essays demonstrate, the possibility of justice is diminished as lawyers pursue self-regulation in the service of power; it is enhanced when lawyers mobilize - in the political arena, workplace and law school - to contest it.
The comprehensive source on attorney licensing and how to reform it. In Shaping the Bar, Joan Howarth describes how the twin gatekeepers of the legal profession—law schools and licensers—are failing the public. Attorney licensing should be laser-focused on readiness to practice law with the minimum competence of a new attorney. According to Howarth, requirements today are both too difficult and too easy. Amid the crisis in unmet legal services, record numbers of law school graduates—disproportionately people of color—are failing bar exams that are not meaningful tests of competence to practice. At the same time, after seven years of higher education, hundreds of thousands of dollars ...
A broad, comprehensive foray into the debate about the legal crisis, written by one of the most respected and authoritative scholars of the legal profession.
A past president of the Association of American Law Schools and senior counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during Clinton's impeachment proceedings, Rhode brings an insider's knowledge to the labyrinthine complexities of how the law works, or fails to work, for most Americans and often for lawyers themselves. She sheds much light on problems with the adversary system, the commercialization of practice, bar disciplinary processes, race and gender bias, and legal education.