Law Commons^™

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 …

The State's Role In The Regulation And Provision Of Legal Services In South Africa And The United States: Supporting, Nudging Or Interfering?, Helen Kruuse, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

An independent legal profession is said to be “the bulwark of a free and democratic society.” It is also said that a high measure of independence of mind and action by legal actors is necessary for the maintenance of the rule of law. However, too often, there is the allegation (within the sociological literature in particular) that the legal profession has used the concepts of independence and the rule of law as a shield or cuirass rather than as a sword. The image of lawyers representing unpopular clients fearlessly and advocating on behalf of unpopular causes, so as to uphold …

Peter Singer, Drowning Children, And Pro Bono, John M.A. Dipippa

Faculty Scholarship

This Article uses the ethicist Peter Singer's principles to examine and critique the legal profession's pro bono efforts in the face of the persistent gap between the public's legal needs and their ability to meet them. Singer argues that adults should jump into a pond to save a drowning child. Using the drowning child as an analogy, this Article argues that lawyers are morally obligated to (1)increase the amount of their pro bono efforts, (2) be more selective in the cases they take, and (3) be significantly more generous in their financial support for legal services providers. These obligations are …

Can A Little Representation Be A Dangerous Thing?, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter, Alyx Mark

Faculty Scholarship

Access to justice interventions that provide a little representation, including nonlawyer representation and various forms of limited legal services, may be valuable solutions for low- and middle-income Americans. However, a thoughtful approach to improving access to justice efforts should recognize that a little representation may have risks. In particular, one potential risk of a little representation is that while it provides assistance with a discrete legal need in a specific moment, the nature of the assistance is incompatible with challenging the law. As a result, individual litigants do not have the benefit of legal challenges in their own cases and …

Justadvice: Studying Law In Snapshots, Brenda Bratton Blom, Leigh Maddox

Faculty Scholarship

Access to legal services continues to be a critical need in the United States. Clinical programs in law schools are part of responding to the demand for these services, but often face the challenge of filling gaps left by larger programs serving the poor or responding to unique legal needs. JustAdvice was designed to provide limited advice to a broad range of people with legal needs, unbundling those services where possible. The story of the development, implementation and transformation of the program into a teaching, triage and referral system that importantly links multiple organizations and services is the core of …

Valuing Small Firm And Solo Law Practice: Models For Expanding Service To Middle-Income Clients, Ann Juergens

Faculty Scholarship

While the profession focuses on ways to meet the critical legal needs of low-income citizens, the needs of the middle group are largely left for the market to fill. The painful fact is that the market has failed to distribute lawyer services to a majority of Americans with legal needs. Ironically, the legal needs of middle-income Americans have risen with the economic crisis even as unemployment among new lawyers has increased. A large supply of trained lawyers without work theoretically should translate into lower costs and more legal needs being met. Yet the cost of legal services has continued to …

Do Not Go Gentle: Using Emeritus Pro Bono Attorneys To Achieve The Promise Of Justice, Kelly S. Terry

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Response To The Video, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

Let me preface my remarks by informing you that I am not a lawyer. That means that there are things I don't get and things that I'll say that you may not grasp immediately, because there are certain assumptions we don't share. To illustrate that, let me just tell you, I don't even get lawyer jokes.

For example, when I saw the movie So Goes A Nation, and Sam Sue says, "Law schools teach basic skills," I didn't realize that was a joke until you all laughed at it. So there are many subtleties of this sort that escape me. …

Rediscovering Client Decisionmaking: The Impact Of Role-Playing, Mary Zulack

Faculty Scholarship

There are more things of importance to representing clients than are disclosed through a typical interview or counseling session, even a session undertaken by a lawyer earnestly attempting to hear rather than ignore the client. We lawyers are often vividly aware, when we pause to contemplate the point, that we do not know all we should about our clients. We may also believe that we have great gulfs of knowledge and experience to cross in order to hear and understand any particular client. Further, we fear that our ability to cross these gulfs is limited by the human, and lawyerly, …

The Devolution Of The Legal Profession: A Demand Side Perspective, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

Economic analysis has not played a significant role in the increasingly intense debate over the decline of professionalism among lawyers.Economists' lack of interest in the issue may be understandable. The lawyers' lament is that the legal profession is devolving into the business of law. That this concern has not captured the economists' attention may reflect only that economists do not view the label "business" as a pejorative. If becoming a business means efficiently rendering an important service in a competitive environment, then of what is there to complain?

Lawyers, more directly concerned with maintaining their professional status, would find little …

Sharing Among The Human Capitalists: An Economic Inquiry Into The Corporate Law Firm And How Partners Split Profits, Ronald J. Gilson, Robert H. Mnookin

Faculty Scholarship

Large corporate law firms seem to be in a state of extraordinary flux. Success and failure are both on the rise. Large firms appear to supply a substantial and growing proportion of the legal services consumed by American business enterprises and to hire a significant fraction of the graduating classes of elite American law schools. Moreover, the last twenty years have witnessed a remarkable expansion in both the number of large firms and the absolute size of the biggest. But accompanying this striking success, there are also signs of serious institutional instability. During the last few years, several previously successful …