Legal Profession Commons^™

Mandatory Pro Bono, Roger C. Cramton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Should lawyers be required to devote a portion of their time or money to public service activities? This issue, commonly referred to as "mandatory pro bono," is much discussed these days. The purpose of this article is to illuminate the policychoices before the profession by surveying the arguments for and against mandatory pro bono.

Debts, Job Choices, And Financial Burden: Educational Debts At Nine American Law Schools, David L. Chambers

Books

American law students are borrowing large sums of money. For graduates at many schools, cumulative debts of $35,000 from college and law school have become the norm and debts of $40,000, $50,000 and even more are common. The sums students are borrowing are much larger today than they were ten years ago, even after adjusting for increases in the cost of living. They have risen at a vastly faster pace than the initial salaries at small law firms and government agencies. They have even risen at a faster pace than the initial salaries in many large firms. The new pattern …

The Role Of Law In Progressive Politics, Cornel West

Vanderbilt Law Review

What is the role and function of the law in contemporary progressive politics? Do legal institutions represent crucial terrain on which significant social change can take place? If so, how? In what ways? How can progressive lawyers remain relatively true to their moral convictions and political goals?

In this Article I shall attempt to respond to these urgent questions.I will try to carve out a vital democratic space left between the Scylla of upbeat liberalism that harbors excessive hopes for the law and the Charybdis of downbeat leftism that promotes exorbitant doubts about the law. My argument rests upon three …

The Role Of The Lawyer In Society, Wm. Reese Smith Jr.

St. Thomas Law Review

The task of adequately addressing the role of the lawyer in society is not without challenge because of the breadth and complexity of the subject. And necessarily, because my background has given me greater knowledge of the role of law and lawyers in the West, my analysis here draws heavily on the history and traditions of Western societies, while trying to be mindful of other legal traditions as well. Because the great difference among legal systems seems so obvious, perhaps one should begin by focusing on shared experiences in the development of the role of law in society. All legal …

Strategic Research In Law And Society, Bryant G. Garth

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Foreword: Telling Stories, Kim Lane Schepple

Michigan Law Review

Why is there such a rush to storytelling? Why has narrative become such an important and recurring theme in legal scholarship these days?

This issue testifies to the attractiveness of, and limits to, storytelling as a force in law. But whose stories are told? Who listens? And who responds? This symposium explores these questions, challenging traditional practices and exploring new ones in the telling of stories in the law. One important lesson that can be learned from this issue is that narrative is a way of organizing, coping with, even acting on the world. Stories carry power because they have …

Empathy, Legal Storytelling, And The Rule Of Law: New Words, Old Wounds?, Toni M. Massaro

Michigan Law Review

The legal storytelling theme that is the focus of this symposium is part of a larger, ongoing intellectual movement. American legal scholarship of the past several decades has revealed deep dissatisfaction with the abstract and collective focus of law and legal discourse. The rebellion against abstraction has, of late, been characterized by a "call to context." One strand of this complex body of thought argues that law should concern itself more with the concrete lives of persons affected by it. One key word in the dialogue is the term "empathy," which appears frequently in the work of critical legal studies, …

Storytelling For Oppositionists And Others: A Plea For Narrative, Richard Delgado

Michigan Law Review

This essay examines the use of stories in the struggle for racial reform. Part I shows how we construct social reality by devising and passing on stories - interpretive structures by which we impose order on experience and it on us. To illustrate how stories structure reality, I choose a single race-tinged event and tell it in the form of five stories or narratives. Each account is followed by analysis, showing what the story includes and leaves out and how it perpetuates one version of social reality rather than another. Part II deals with counterstories, competing versions that can be …

A Tale Of Two Clients: Thinking About Law As Language, Clark D. Cunningham

Michigan Law Review

This is a true story. It is actually three true stories. The article taken as a whole tells a story of my personal search for a new way of talking about the experience of being a lawyer, a quest which is leading me to think more and more about law as a kind of language and lawyering as a form of translation. Rather like a medieval romance, embedded within this story of a quest are two tales, about clients I have represented in the course of my clinical teaching.

As much as possible, both levels of narrative are presented in …

The Cognitive Dimension Of The Agon Between Legal Power And Narrative Meaning, Steven L. Winter

Michigan Law Review

In Part II, I first provide a brief description of what we are learning about the grounded and imaginative nature of the cognitive process. I then elaborate the cognitive structure of the concept narrative and consider the manner in which we employ that concept in recognizing, understanding, and constructing narratives of all types - from folktales like the midrash to avant-garde literature like Waiting for Godot. In Part III, I employ this information about the cognitive and narrative processes to explore the secondary role of narrative in the institutionalization of legal and social meaning. I will identify the cognitive …

Accommodation And Satisfaction: Women And Men Lawyers And The Balance Of Work And Family, David L. Chambers

Articles

This study of graduates of the University of Michigan Law School from the late 1970s reports on the differing ways that women and men have responded to the conflicting claims of work and family. It finds that women with children who have entered the profession have indeed continued to bear the principalr esponsibilitiesf or the care of children, but it alsof inds that these women, with all their burdens, are more satisfied with their careers and with the balance of their family and professional lives than other women and than men.

Educational Debts And The Worsening Position Of Small-Firm, Government, And Legal-Services Lawyers, David L. Chambers

Articles

Law school operating costs are up. Tuitions are up. The debts of law students are up. What is happening to the students who have borrowed large sums? Are their debts affecting their decisions about the jobs to seek? Once in practice, are they significantly affecting the standard of living they can afford to maintain? What, in particular, is the effect of debts on those who enter-or contemplate entering-small firms, government, legal services, and "public interest" work where salaries are lower than in most other settings in which lawyers work? In the preceding essay, Jack Kramer has performed another extremely valuable …

One Judge's Battle Against The New York City Judicial Establishment, Percy R. Luney Jr.

North Carolina Central Law Review

No abstract provided.

Funding Legal Services For The Poor: Floria's Iota Program -- Now Is The Time To Make It Mandatory, Gregory A. Hearing

Florida State University Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Public Defender, Robert R. Kimball

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Public Defender by Lisa J. McIntyre

Naturalization Ceremony: U.S. District Court, Southern District Of New York, Roger J. Miner '56

Naturalization Ceremonies

No abstract provided.

Out-Of-State Attorney Fee Forfeiture, Lawrence A. Cunningham

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Economics And Law: Two Cultures In Tension, James Boyd White

Articles

I want to preface my remarks by saying something about the kind of talk this is going to be. As my title says, I shall speak mainly about economics and law, which I shall examine as forms of thought and life, or what I shall call cultures. With law, about which in fact I shall speak rather briefly, I am naturally familiar by training and experience. But with economics I am familiar only as an observer­ as a general reader who reads the newspaper, as a lawyer who has followed a little of the law and economics literature, and as …

Intellectual Integration, James Boyd White

Articles

In this paper, I want to talk about the activity of intellectual integration itself: about what it can mean to integrate-to put together in a complex whole-aspects of our culture, or of the world, that seem to us disparate or unconnected; and what it can mean in so doing to integrate-to bring together in interactive life-aspects of our own minds and beings that we normally separate or divide from each other: I want to think of integration, that is-and of its opposite, disintegration-as taking place on two planes of existence at once, the cultural and the individual. For what is …

Thinking About Our Language, James Boyd White

Articles

Except for one meeting, which I will describe below, I knew Bob Cover only through his writings. This circumstance was of course a disappointment to me, for our interests were similar, and his death now makes the loss irreparable. But perhaps this is less of a limitation than would normally be the case, for as much as anyone in the law Bob was, and is, actively present in his writing, both as a person and as a mind.-But that dichotomy of person and mind gets it wrong, for what I would like to catch is a sense of fusion or …

The Conservation Movement In A Corporate Age, Charles F. Wilkinson

Publications

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Analysis Of The Medical And Legal Professions' Experiences And Perceptions Of Medical And Legal Malpractice, J. Douglas Peters, Steven K. Nord, R. Donald Woodson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The purpose of this study is to describe the general perceptions of doctors and lawyers regarding medical and legal malpractice. The study does not purport to draw conclusions about the statistical significance of the presented numbers and percentages. In addition, the results presented should be interpreted in light of the methodology and response rate obtained in the survey.

Styles Of Law And The Attainment Of Social Justice, Richard O. Lempert, Joseph Sanders

Book Chapters

In the last chapter we focused on the meaning of legal autonomy and on the constituent elements of the ideal type. We noted two requisites for the autonomous application of law: judicial formalism and equal competence. But we also argued that the autonomous application of law does not guarantee that the law as applied will not perpetuate or advance socioeconomic differences. For applied law to be autonomous in this further sense, legal norms, in addition, must be status neutral, and the distribution of welfare in society must be such that the neutral norms do not disproportionately benefit some people. These …

Lawyers And Lawmaking, Frederick Schauer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Reconstructing American Law by Bruce A. Ackerman

Money And Justice: Who Owns The Courts?, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Money and Justice: Who Owns the Courts? by Lois G. Forer

Transitional Legal Practice And Professional Ideology, Bryant G. Garth

Michigan Journal of International Law

This essay assumes that there are three other reasons for studying transnational legal practice. First, such a study provides a way to explore some of the dilemmas that we often overlook about our domestic legal system. In both the domestic and transnational legal settings we are uncomfortable with the idea of law as "merely a business"; troubled by the invasion of "legality" into domains that once had seemed immune from state regulation; wary of the expense of "mega" law and litigation; reticent about a "total justice" which is expected to compensate individual victims of every unpleasant social accident; and nervous …

The Trouble With Lawyers (And Law Schools), Roger C. Cramton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Why Lawyers Should Be Allowed To Advertise: A Market Analysis Of Legal Services , Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr., Russell G. Pearce, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Faculty Scholarship

Last August, the American Bar Association adopted the Model Rules of Professional Conduct which significantly altered the ABA' position on lawyer advertising. It is still unclear how the states will respond to the ABA's new position, and the debate about the propriety of lawyer advertising continue. In the authors' view, both sides of the debate have overlooked an important point: For purposes of analyzing the advertising problem, legal services are of two types, and the effect of advertising on the legal services market will vary with the type of service involved."Individualized" services involve legal matters that pose a significant risk …

Why Legal Services For The Poor?, Roger C. Cramton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Legal Aid For The Poor: A Conceptual Analysis, Marshall J. Breger

Scholarly Articles

In this Article Professor Breger examines the competing justifications that have been advanced for the provision of free legal aid to those who cannot afford to engage a private attorney. Professor Breger argues that every citizen has the right to effective access to the courts to resolve disputes in that they aret he only state-sanctionedd ispute resolution mechanism. Because of the complexity of our legal system, effective access to the courts often requires the services of an attorney. Under this theory of "access rights" a person is entitled to free legal aid when necessary for the enforcement of a legal …