Legal Profession Commons^™

Lawyering Paradoxes: Making Meaning Of The Contradictions, Susan P. Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

Effective lawyering requires the ability to manage contradictory yet interdependent practices. In their role as traditionally understood, lawyers must fight, judge, debate, minimize risk, and advance clients’ interests. Yet increasingly, lawyers must ALSO collaborate, build trust, innovate, enable effective risk-taking, and hold clients accountable for adhering to societal values. Law students and lawyers alike struggle, often unproductively, to reconcile these tensions. Law schools often address them as a dilemma requiring a choice or overlook the contradictions that interfere with their integration.

This Article argues instead that these seemingly contradictory practices can be brought together through the theory and action of …

Combating Silence In The Profession, Veronica Root Martinez

Faculty Scholarship

Members of the legal profession have recently taken a public stance against a wave of oppressive policies and practices. From helping immigrants stranded in airports to protesting in the face of white nationalists, lawyers are advocating for equality within and throughout American society each and every day. Yet as these lawyers go out into the world on behalf of others, they do so while their very profession continues to struggle with its own discriminatory past.

For decades, the legal profession purposefully excluded women, religious minorities, and people of color from its ranks, while instilling a select group of individuals with …

Simplified Courts Can't Solve Inequality, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter

Faculty Scholarship

State civil courts struggle to handle the volume of cases before them. Litigants in these courts, most of whom are unrepresented, struggle to navigate the courts to solve their problems. This access-to-justice crisis has led to a range of reform efforts and solutions. One type of reform, court simplification, strives to reduce the complexity of procedures and information used by courts to help unrepresented litigants navigate the judicial system. These reforms mitigate but do not solve the symptoms of the larger underlying problem: state civil courts are struggling because they have been stuck with legal cases that arise from the …

Cases And Case-Lawyers, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

In the nineteenth century, the term “case-lawyer” was used as a label for lawyers who seemed to care more about locating precedents applicable to their current cases than understanding the principles behind the reported case law. Criticisms of case-lawyers appeared in English journals in the late 1820s, then in the United States, usually from those who believed that every lawyer needed to know and understand the unchanging principles of the common law in order to resolve issues not found in the reported cases. After the Civil War, expressions of concern about caselawyers increased with the significant growth in the amount …

Why Is There No Clear Doctrine Of Informed Consent For Lawyers?, Nancy J. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

Written as a contribution to a symposium issue of the Toledo Law Review honoring retiring professor Susan Martyn, this article takes as its starting point an early article by Professor Martyn entitled “Informed Consent in the Practice of Law.” In that article, Professor Martyn decried the inability of clients to control the course of their representation and urged state legislatures to remedy this situation by enacting legislation creating an action in damages based upon a lawyer’s failure to obtain the client’s informed consent. Such an action would be similar to common law actions that courts had recently recognized by patients …

Lawyers On Trial: Juror Hostility To Defendants In Legal Malpractice Trials, Herbert M. Kritzer, Neil Vidmar

Faculty Scholarship

In contrast to medical malpractice, legal malpractice is a phenomenon that has attracted little attention from empirically-oriented scholars. This paper is part of a larger study of legal malpractice claiming and litigation. Given the evidence on the frequency of legal malpractice claims, there are surprisingly few legal malpractice cases that result in jury verdicts. There are many possible explanations for this, one of which reflects the perception that lawyers are held in such low esteem by potential jurors that they risk harsh treatment by jurors when they are defendants in legal malpractice trials. Because we could find no empirical evidence …

Setting Your Compass: Some Thoughts From A (Former) Djag, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Retaining Color, Veronica Root

Faculty Scholarship

It is no secret that large law firms are struggling in their efforts to retain attorneys of color. This is despite two decades of aggressive tracking of demographic rates, mandates from clients to improve demographic diversity, and the implementation of a variety of diversity efforts within large law firms. In part, law firm retention efforts are stymied by the reality that elite, large law firms require some level of attrition to function properly under the predominant business model. This reality, however, does not explain why firms have so much difficulty retaining attorneys of color—in particular black and Hispanic attorneys.

And …

Reflections On Team Production In Professional Schools And The Workplace, Robert J. Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Aba, The Aall, The Aals, And The “Duplication Of Legal Publications”, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

Between 1935 and 1940, the American Bar Association, the Association of American Law Schools, and the American Association of Law Libraries joined forces to work on solutions to a problem often referred to as the “duplication of legal publications.” The need for practicing attorneys and law libraries to purchase multiple and duplicative versions of published law reports and other law books was burdensome in costs, complicated the research process, and contributed to what the American Law Institute identified as the two chief defects of American law: “its uncertainty and its complexity.” This article highlights the efforts of the ABA, the …

A Jurisprudence Of Insurgency: Lawyers As Companions Of Unimagined Change, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Some Thoughts On The State Of Women Lawyers And Why Title Vii Has Not Worked For Them, Theresa M. Beiner

Faculty Scholarship

This essay discusses why women lawyers have not been as successful in large firms in spite of graduating from law school in large numbers over the last twenty years. It begins by giving a snapshot of the state of women lawyers, including women lawyers of color. It includes stories and studies of women’s struggles at these firms. It also describes why Title VII has not worked to solve the problems associated with being a successful woman in a law firm. Finally, it suggests some potential solutions that may help women be more successful in these environments.

Not All Lawyers Are Equal: Difficulties That Plague Women And Women Of Color, Theresa M. Beiner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

What To Do When Your Case Is Front Page News: Panel Discussion, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lawyers And Social Justice, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Warrior Bards, Kevin Mccarthy, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Crime Talk, Rights Talk, And Double-Talk: Thoughts On Reading Encyclopedia Of Crime And Justice (Review Essay), Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lawyers, Politics, And The "Lawyers' Interest": An Historical Inquiry, James W. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The assumption that the occupational identification of "lawyer" is the salient feature in evaluating political motivation is interesting, if questionable, according to the Author. Does occupational identity overwhelm other identities? Are politically active lawyers really a homogeneous group? Are they less affected by competing identities associated with wealth, geography, familial and constituency concerns, political ideology, party considerations, or any of the myriad other sources of public and private motivation of behavior? Surely the hypothesis that politically active lawyers behave differently from nonlawyers is worth investigating. This Article offers some preliminary responses to these questions posed, which are grounded in empirical …

Foreword: Waiver Of Constitutional Rights: Disquiet In The Citadel, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

Foreword to Harvard Law Review review of Supreme Court 1969 Term

Remarks By The President Of The Association Of American Law Schools, Harold Shepherd

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

American Lawyers And Their Books, William R. Roalfe

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.