The Number and Earnings of Lawyers: Some Recent Findings

The number of lawyers in a society may depend on the level of real income and on the scope of government regulation. Cross-national data and time-series data suggest that the growth in the number of lawyers in the United States during the past 50 years can be better explained by increases in real income than by increases in government regulation. Other tests also suggest that regulation is of lesser importance. The combined share of memberships in American Bar Association Sections more closely allied with government regulation has not increased over time. The share of billings by the legal service industry to firms is found to be relatively stable throughout the post-World War II period, suggesting that the scope of government regulation has not caused business firms to use the legal service industry more intensively over time than individuals have. An examination of the earnings of lawyers over time suggests that members of the legal profession experienced relative prosperity during the 1920s and early 1930s and during the 1960s and early 1970s. The length of these prosperous periods is traced to the slow adjustment in the number of places in law schools.     

Lawyers of the Right: Networks and Organization

Lawyers for conservative and libertarian causes are active in organizing and mobilizing interest groups within the conservative coalition, and networks of relationships among those lawyers help to maintain and shape the coalition. Using data gathered in interviews with seventy-two such lawyers, this article analyzes characteristics of the lawyers and the structure of their networks. The findings suggest that the networks are divided into segments or blocks that are identified with particular constituencies, but that a distinct set of actors with extensive relationships serves to bridge the constituencies. Measures of centrality and brokerage confirm the structural importance of these actors in the network, and a search of references in news media confirms their prominence or prestige. This "core" set of actors occupies the "structural hole" in the network that separates the business constituency from religious conservatives. Libertarians, located near the core of the network, also occupy an intermediate position. Regression analysis of ties within the network suggests that the Federalist Society plays an important role in bringing the lawyers together.     

论律师的职业属性

关于律师的职业属性问题,各国《律师法》有不同的表述。我国对律师性质的立法界定,经历了从“国家的法律工作者”到“依法取得执业证书,为社会提供法律服务的执业人员”的认识过程。在《律师法》中准确界定律师的职业属性,是科学安排律师制度、合理设计律师行业发展的前提。值此《律师法》修改之际,本刊特邀请几位专家学者就律师的职业属性问题进行了一次笔谈:     

中国律师的使命——江西南芳律师事务所党建工作和剑先争优活动的调研报告

在律师行业基层党组织和党员中深入开展创先争优活动，对于巩固和拓展学习实践科学发展观活动成果，全面加强律师行业党的建设和律师队伍建设，促进律师事业健康发展，充分发挥律师工作职能，更好地服务大局、服务群众，具有十分重要的意义。为此，笔者先后深入5地市6个律师事务所开展律师行业党建和创先争优活动的专题调研。现以江西南芳律师事务所为例，将调研中形成的几点思考汇报如下。     

Lawyers and Localities: The Interaction of Community Context and Professionalism

Most studies of the legal profession, done in metropolitan settings, have indicated that the profession is characterized by deep divisions associated with varying practice patterns, professional status, and orientation. But the sources of division within the bar include more than the specialization and stratification that are typical of the bar in metropolitan settings. Community context also appears to be a source of division. It determines not only the character of a lawyer's cases and clients but also the manner in which practice is conducted. This comparison of practice patterns in Missouri of rural lawyers with those in a middle-sized city (Springfield) revealed that while the small town context protects the bar from the centrifugal forces of stratification found in larger settings, it also has elements that challenge the professional independence of the practitioner. The small town or rural practitioner is very much a part of the local life, and thus local opinion and values have a salience for practice patterns not typical of larger settings. In addition, these rural lawyers are less likely to be engaged exclusively in law practice.
Overall, the data suggest that the legal profession is divided not only by specialization and its attendant internal stratification but also by the size and character of the local context. In contrast to the view that the profession is a homogeneous professional subculture, we found that the bar may better be thought of as a rather loose-knit group with tenuous collegial ties whose professionalism is under constant challenge from the community in which law practice occurs.     

政府律师的性质及职责

一、政府律师的概念政府律师就是指在政府机关工作的公职律师。即政府律师既有各级政府机关公职人员的身份,又是一名合格的律师。这就是说,一方面政府律师占有国家各级政府机关的行政编制,有固定的岗位,享受国家公职人员待遇,其工作方式同其他政府公职人员一样,以自己的专业知识为所在的政府机关提供无偿的法律服务,不能面向社会执行律师业务,更不能实行执业收费;另一方面,政府律师应是一名符合法定条件的律师,具有法律所规定的律师资格,依法持有律师执业许可证,享有《律师法》规定的权利,并承担相应的义务,是享受政府公务员待遇的律师。因…     

The Ethics of Corporate Lawyers: A Sociological Approach

The American Bar Association is considering a revision of its Code of Professional Responsibility. One revision deals specifically with lawyers whose clients are organizations; it attempts to delineate the ethical responsibilities of such lawyers when they discover an employee or a member of one of their clients is engaged in wrongdoing on the organization's behalf. Because the proposal suggests that corporate counsel may be justified in public disclosure of the wrongdoing when the organization itself fails to rectify the problem, it has sparked much controversy in the profession and much speculation as to whether and when corporate counsel will "blow the whistle." The article offers a sociological perspective on the act of a corporate counsel's public disclosure of organizational wrongdoing. The act of disclosure is treated as a social behavior, the likelihood of which is increased or decreased by a number of factors including the attorney's awareness of the wrongdoing, the attorney's orientations to the larger profession, the structure of the professional practice setting within which the counsel is located, and the supports for disclosure offered by the legal profession through its formal organizations. These factors are described and then combined into a general predictive model of disclosure by corporate counsel. A concluding discussion of the general ramifications of the proposed revisions focuses on the social implications of the attorney-client privilege, in which the client is as unique an actor as is the large organization.     

Political Lawyers: The Structure of a National Network

Some research on lawyers active in politics has found that the ties among them create networks in which a center or core of influential actors is surrounded by more peripheral participants. Other studies, however, found more segmented networks, sometimes lacking central players. This research examines the structure and determinants of political ties among forty‐seven elite lawyers who served organizations prominent in fourteen national policy issues in 2004–05. The analysis finds a network structure that resembles a rough circle with Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other. Lawyers affiliated with organizations representing a broad constellation of interests are closer to the center of the network, while those working for specialized or narrow causes tend to be located in the periphery. Ties are more dense among conservatives than among liberals. Lawyers who work as organizational leaders or managers are more likely to be near the center than are litigators. Central actors contribute larger amounts to election campaigns. The organized bar, especially the American Bar Association, appears to provide links between liberals and conservatives in one segment of the network.     

Public Lawyers and Private Clients: An Empirical Observation on the Relative Success Rates of Cause Lawyers

Cause lawyering is often criticized for creating an untenable tension between the professional obligations of the lawyer to the individual client and the lawyer's ideological commitment to public causes. I sought to test empirically the validity of this argument by comparing the relative success rates of political lawyers and non‐political lawyers in defending their clients' interests in litigation concerning house‐demolition orders before the Israeli High Court of Justice. I found that the general success rates of political lawyers in the research population were significantly higher than those of non‐political lawyers. These findings can serve as an additional support for the various arguments in favor of cause lawyering.     

Technology utilization — The new corporate challenge

Technology transfer and utilization is a process that has a profound impact on the survival of the firm, particularly in today's high technology market where technological changes are rapid and often dramatic. The market place both locally and internationally is replete with business failures resulting from the inability of firms to maintain a competitive edge in technology utilization and/or transfer. We contend that many such failures could be avoided by establishment of in-house programs developed specifically to address the utilization and transfer of technologies associated with the firm. This paper proposes a general methodology to identify and establish such an in-house program regardless of the technology area of interest. Once implemented such program can be used as engines of technological innovation by working in an active versus reactivemode.     

Lawyers as infrastructures: mediations,blockages, and new possibilities in grassroots movements

What roles do lawyers play when their own subaltern communities are mobilizing for justice? Drawing on the case of anti-eviction mobilization on the island of Al-Warraq in Egypt, this article investigates the infrastructural roles of community lawyers in grassroots movements. As their profession transformed into an underpaid and undervalued occupation, masses of lawyers became precarious professionals living subaltern lives. Living among the poor with the elite knowledge of the law enabled community lawyers to forge new relations between the grassroots and the elites, the streets and the courtroom, and farmers and the national media. Drawing on an ethnography of the movement, I posit that community lawyers operate as social infrastructures: liminal subjects in uncertain times, capable of generating new possibilities and social relations. As social infrastructures within their communities, they shape the opportunities for action, facilitating new modes of resistance while blocking others.     

Migration and Social Structure: The Spatial Mobility of Chinese Lawyers

This article uses the case of Chinese migrant lawyers to examine how the spatial mobility of individual practitioners shapes the social structure of the profession. Drawing on data from 261 interviews conducted in twelve Chinese provinces during 2004–2010, the 2009 Chinese Legal Environment Survey, lawyer yearbooks, and other public sources, the authors examine the patterns, causes, outcomes, and structural consequences of Chinese lawyers' internal migration. The empirical analysis shows that the spatial mobility of Chinese lawyers has not only increased the stratification and inequality of law practice in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, but it has also aggravated the shortage of legal service and intensified interprofessional competition in western and rural China. Based on findings from the Chinese case, the article connects the sociology of law and migration studies and moves toward a new processual theory for understanding the relationship between microlevel mobility and macrolevel stratification in the legal profession.