Legal Profession Commons^™

There Goes The Monopoly: The California Proposal To Allow Nonlawyers To Practice Law, Kathleen E. Justice

Vanderbilt Law Review

Lawyers love to compete, but only with each other. The legal profession consistently has fought outside competition and successfully has controlled competition to ensure professional survival. Lawyers control competition through participation in bar associations, legislatures, and courts. For example, state statutes and bar association regulations' forbid the practice of law by nonlawyerss To enforce this prohibition, all states require that state and professional bar associations certify individuals as competent legal practitioners before they can practice law. Courts generally have upheld these statutes and regulations. Thus, lawyers have succeeded in limiting outside competition.

These limitations, however, may be resulting in denial …

The Challenge Of Change: The Practice Of Law In The Year 2000, James W. Jones

Vanderbilt Law Review

The past two decades have witnessed extraordinary changes that will have a lasting impact on the structure of the legal profession and the ways in which lawyers approach their practices. Some twenty years ago the legal profession was remarkably stable, having changed little in the preceding 100 years. The bar was relatively small, fairly homogeneous, mostly male, and overwhelmingly white anglo-saxon Protestant.The profession was, in the main, a close-knit fraternity of like-minded practitioners who shared a strong sense of common values and a general disdain for any efforts to commercialize the profession. The American Bar Association's 1908 Canons of Ethics …

The Interface Of Myth And Practice In Law, Stanley Ingber

Vanderbilt Law Review

The purpose of this Article is to explore this myth, including its apparent inaccuracies, and to explain its persistence by recognizing the valid societal function that it fulfills. Part I will focus on this myth or religion of law--a law of rules--and attempt to explain its attractiveness to the nascent and practicing legal decisionmaker. Part II will explore the role of the lawyer within a process of decision making that is actually imbued with ambiguity. Finally, Part III will consider the remaining significance of "the law" as a very real factor that limits and controls the legal decisionmaker.