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Throughout history, the American legal profession has tried to hold tight to its identity by retreating into its traditional values and structure during times of self-perceived crisis. The American Legal Profession in Crisis: Resistance and Responses to Change analyzes the efforts of the legal profession to protect and maintain the status quo even as the world around it changed. Author James E. Moliterno, consistently argues that the profession has resisted societal change and sought to ban or discourage new models of legal representation created by such change. In response to every crisis, lawyers asked: "How can we stay even more 'the same' than we already are?" The legal profession has been an unwilling, capitulating entity to any transformation wrought by the overwhelming tide of change. Only when the shifts in society, culture, technology, economics, and globalization could no longer be denied did the legal profession make any proactive changes that would preserve status quo. This book demonstrates how the profession has held to its anachronistic ways at key crisis points in US history: Watergate, communist infiltration, waves of immigration, the explosion of litigation, and the current economic crisis that blends with dramatic changes in technology, communications, and globalization. Ultimately, Moliterno urges the profession to look outward and forward to find in society and culture the causes and connections with these periodic crises. Doing so would allow the profession to grow with the society, solve problems with, rather than against, the flow of society, and be more attuned to the very society the profession claims to serve. This paperback version includes a commentary on the prevailing crisis in legal education.
This book explores the structure and regulation of the contemporary American legal profession. It introduces students to the rich empirical literature on the profession, teaching them about the profession's overall composition and organization as well as huge variation in the practice settings, types of work, and daily experiences of American lawyers and their clients. It describes powerful economic and cultural forces that are reshaping the legal profession, and it presents the most recent scholarship and commentary on new challenges for the legal profession posed by technology, litigation finance, globalization, access to justice, diversity, and changes to legal education. Suitable for seminars or courses on professional identity and the sociology of the legal profession, the book invites students to reflect on their place in the profession and how they will navigate the turbulent landscape to chart successful, rewarding and responsible careers in almost any type of practice today's law graduates might enter. This book presents materials and questions drawn from recent events highlighting professional ethics issues currently in the news, but it could supplement rather than replace materials on the law of professional responsibility. The book provides sufficient explanation of basic legal concepts and the operation of the legal system to make it suitable for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses, as well as first-year law students, but it also works very well for second and third year courses.
"This collection of articles is an effort to create a greater understanding of the empirical issues that lie behind the debate over whether in the practice of law the ideals of professionalism have been replaced by the demands of commercialism. This book is the most systematic attempt so far to examine what professionalism means in the various arenas of legal practice in the United States. It also seeks to advance the theoretical interpretations that lie at the heart of the scholarship on professionalism and establish a framework for analyzing the issues that is more grounded than previous idealist accounts, yet retains some of the ideas of contingency and changeability that structualist accounts have ignored"--Preface.
As a part of our CasebookPlus offering, you'll receive a new print book along with lifetime digital access to the downloadable eBook. In addition, you'll receive 12-month online access to the Learning Library which includes quizzes tied specifically to your book, an outline starter and three leading study aids in that subject and the Gilbert� Law Dictionary. The included study aids are Acing Professional Responsibility, Exam Pro on Professional Responsibility, Objective and Legal Ethics in a Nutshell. The redemption code will be shipped to you with the book. With clear and concise explanations of all basic concepts in the law of lawyering and all topics tested on the MPRE, this accessible book allows professors to satisfy the ABA professional responsibility requirement with a course that students find highly engaging and useful. Unlike most professional responsibility textbooks on the market, however, it links ethics issues to portraits of the practice contexts in which they typically arise for real lawyers, helping students appreciate their relevance in contemporary practice. It also introduces students to the rich empirical literature on the profession, teaching them about the profession's overall composition and organization as well as huge variation in the practice settings, types of work, and daily experiences of American lawyers and their clients. It describes powerful economic and cultural forces that are reshaping the legal profession, and it explores current controversies relating to access to justice, globalization, technology, diversity, and legal education. It invites students to reflect on their place in the profession and how they will navigate the turbulent landscape to chart successful, rewarding and responsible careers in almost any type of practice today's law graduates might enter. Every chapter also contains problems that can be used in class discussion or as written exercises. This is the only PR book on the market that provides sufficient explanation of basic legal concepts and the operation of the legal system to make it suitable for first-year students, but it also works very well for second and third year courses.
Mary Ann Glendon's A Nation Under Lawyers is a guided tour through the maze of the late-twentieth-century legal world. Glendon depicts the legal profession as a system in turbulence, where a variety of beliefs and ideals are vying for dominance.
Virtually all American judges are former lawyers. This book argues that these lawyer-judges instinctively favor the legal profession in their decisions and that this bias has far-reaching and deleterious effects on American law. There are many reasons for this bias, some obvious and some subtle. Fundamentally, it occurs because - regardless of political affiliation, race, or gender - every American judge shares a single characteristic: a career as a lawyer. This shared background results in the lawyer-judge bias. The book begins with a theoretical explanation of why judges naturally favor the interests of the legal profession and follows with case law examples from diverse areas, including legal ethics, criminal procedure, constitutional law, torts, evidence, and the business of law. The book closes with a case study of the Enron fiasco, an argument that the lawyer-judge bias has contributed to the overweening complexity of American law, and suggests some possible solutions.
A counterintuitive and optimistic reconsideration of the crisis in the American legal profession
Distinguished scholars in law and the social sciences examine the state of American legal culture, particularly adversarial legalism, in light of the criticisms of the current anti-lawyer movement. They assess the strengths and weaknesses of this culture, its impact on the broader society, and its recent spread to other countries. The American legal system is under heavy attack for the impact it is supposed to have on American culture and society generally. A common complaint of the anti-lawyer movement is that under the influence of lawyers we have become a litigious society, in the process undermining traditional American values such as self-reliance and responsibility. In this volume a group of distinguished scholars in law and the social sciences explores these questions. Neither an apology for lawyers nor a critique, Legal Culture and the Legal Profession examines the successes and the problems of the U. S. legal system, its impact on the broader culture, and the spread of American legal culture abroad.
For nearly two centuries, Kronman argues, the aspirations of American lawyers were shaped by their allegiance to a distinctive ideal of professional excellence. In the last generation, however, this ideal has failed, undermining the identity of lawyers as a group and making it unclear to those in the profession what it means for them personally to have chosen a life in the law.
In the aftermath of sixth-century barbarian invasions, the legal profession that had grown and flourished during the Roman Empire vanished. Nonetheless, professional lawyers suddenly reappeared in Western Europe seven hundred years later during the 1230s when church councils and public authorities began to impose a body of ethical obligations on those who practiced law. James Brundage's The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession traces the history of legal practice from its genesis in ancient Rome to its rebirth in the early Middle Ages and eventual resurgence in the courts of the medieval church. By the end of the eleventh century, Brundage argues, renewed interest in Roman law combined with the rise of canon law of the Western church to trigger a series of consolidations in the profession. New legal procedures emerged, and formal training for proctors and advocates became necessary in order to practice law in the reorganized church courts. Brundage demonstrates that many features that characterize legal advocacy today were already in place by 1250, as lawyers trained in Roman and canon law became professionals in every sense of the term. A sweeping examination of the centuries-long power struggle between local courts and the Christian church, secular rule and religious edict, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession will be a resource for the professional and the student alike.