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Review Of Judging Credentials: Nonlawyer Judges And The Politics Of Professionalism By Doris Marie Provine, William T. Gallagher

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Doris Marie Provine's Judging Credentials is a provocative work that draws on and furthers the critical approach to the study of professions. The book is a study of judges in lower courts of limited jurisdiction who are not lawyers, a group of considerable size. There are over 13,000 of them in the United States. In this work Provine examines the legal profession's assertion that these judges are inferior to judges who are lawyers. Contrary to both professional claims and popular belief, Provine argues that lay judges in America's lower courts perform as well as their lawyer counterparts. Her conclusions derive …