Advocates,experts, and suspects: three images of lawyers in Chinese media reports

Research on the public image of lawyers often focuses on lawyers’ role as advocates and neglects other representations. Based on the content analysis of 669 media reports of Chinese criminal cases between 1979 and 2009, this article provides a typology of lawyers’ media images: as advocates, as experts and as suspects. Even when lawyers are characterized as defenders of suspects, media depictions of their roles are vacuous and lawyers may be considered unnecessary and dispensable. Furthermore, the characterization of lawyers in the case stories has a binary quality that is contingent upon the media's substantive judgment of case outcomes. With findings from the Chinese case, the article calls for more attention to lawyers’ images in the media, both in China and in comparative research on the legal profession.     

Cause Lawyers,Political Violence,and Professionalism in Conflict

This article examines how cause lawyers in conflicted and authoritarian societies balance their professional responsibilities as lawyers with their commitment to a political cause. It is drawn from extensive interviews with both lawyers and political activists in a range of societies. It focuses on the challenges for lawyers in managing relations with violent politically‐motivated clients and their movements. Using the notion of ‘legitimation work', it seeks to examine the complex, fluid, and contingent understandings of legal professionalism that is developed in such contexts, offering three overlapping ‘ideal types’ of cause lawyers in order to better understand the meaning of legal professionalism in such sites: (a) struggle lawyers (b) human rights activists and (c) a ‘pragmatic moral community'. The article concludes by re‐examining how law is imagined in the legitimation work of cause lawyers in such settings and how that work is remembered in the transition from violence.     

Even Lawyers Get the Blues: Gender, Depression, and Job Satisfaction in Legal Practice

It is an intriguing puzzle that women lawyers, despite less desirable working conditions and blocked career advancement, report similar satisfaction as men lawyers with their legal careers. The paradoxical work satisfaction reported by women and men lawyers obscures a more notable difference in their depressed or despondent feelings. Using a panel study of women and men lawyers practicing in Toronto since the mid-1980s, we find at least three causal pathways through which gender indirectly is connected to job dissatisfaction and feelings of despondency. The first path is through gender differences in occupational power, which lead to differential despondency. The second path is through differences in perceived powerlessness, which directly influence job dissatisfaction. The third path is through feelings of despondency that result from concerns about the career consequences of having children. The combined picture that results illustrates the necessity to include measures of depressed affect in studies of dissatisfaction with legal practice. Explicit measurement and modeling of concerns about the consequences of having children and depressed feelings reveal a highly gendered response of women to legal practice that is otherwise much less apparent. Women are more likely to respond to their professional grievances with internalized feelings of despondency than with externalized expressions of job dissatisfaction. That is, they are more likely to privatize than publicize their professional troubles.     

Lawyers for Conservative Causes: Clients, Ideology, and Social Distance

Scholars have devoted attention to "cause lawyers" on the political left, but lawyers who work on the conservative side of the American political spectrum have received relatively little academic consideration. This article presents systematic data on the characteristics of and relationships among lawyers affiliated with organizations active on a selected set of 17 conservative issues. We find that the lawyers serve several separate and distinct constituencies—business conservatives, Christian conservatives, libertarians, abortion opponents—and that the credentials of the lawyers serving these varying constituencies differ significantly. The greatest degree of social separation occurs between the business constituency and the abortion opponents, with another clear separation between libertarians and the interest groups devoted to traditional family values and order maintenance. The divisions among these constituencies appear to reflect the difference between "insider politics" and "populism," which is manifested in part in actual geographic separation between lawyers located in the District of Columbia and those in the South, West, and Midwest. In the center of the network, however, we find some potential "mediators"—prominent lawyers who may facilitate communication and coordination among the several constituencies. These lawyers and the organizations they serve attempt to merge morality, market freedom, and individual liberty concerns, and they convene meetings of diverse sets of lawyers and organizational leaders to seek consensus on policy goals. Nonetheless, the findings indicate that most organizations are seldom active on issues that lie beyond the relatively narrow boundaries of their own interests.     

Origin Myths,Contracts, and the Hunt for Pari Passu

We use interviews with corporate lawyers and a data set of contracts to explore an elite area of legal practice: sovereign bond lending. Sovereign debt lawyers work at prestigious global law firms, yet the contracts they produce include some terms that defy explanation. Lawyers often account for the existence of these terms through origin myths. Focusing on one contract term, the pari passu clause, we explore two puzzling aspects of these myths. First, we demonstrate that the myths are inaccurate as to both the clause's origin and the role of lawyers in contract drafting. Second, the myths often are unflattering, inaccurately portraying lawyers as engaged in little more than rote copying. We probe this disjuncture between the myths and lawyers' actual practices and explore why contracts origin myths might hold such appeal for this elite segment of the bar.     

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.     

Guardians at the Gate: The Backgrounds, Career Paths, and Professional Development of Private US Immigration Lawyers

This article presents findings from a qualitative study of seventy-one New York immigration lawyers who are engaged in private practice. It focuses on the lawyers' backgrounds, career paths, and early professional training and describes, inter alia, the unusual diversity of this bar, the lawyers' reasons for practicing immigration law, the ways in which they learn to practice law, and the strong sense of community within the private immigration bar. It uses the idea of communities of practice to help understand how lawyers learn from their colleagues and are influenced by them. The article identifies several factors that may contribute to the supportiveness of the bar and the strong sense of community within that practice specialty, notwithstanding its great diversity. It concludes by making some preliminary comparisons between immigration lawyers and lawyers in other practice specialties and by identifying some questions for future study.     

Battered wives,lawyers, and district attorneys: An examination of law in action

The legal services received by 146 Milwaukee women who had been beaten by their husbands, but had been free of the violence for at least a year, are described and evaluated. Of these women 106 recieved legal help in connection with at least one battering incident. Some women saw more than one member of the legal profession, so the total number of legal contacts among the 106 women was 255. There is evidence that lawyers and district attorneys were most likely to be used by those battered women for whom the use of personal strategies and informal help sources (such as family and friends) were ineffective in combatting the violence. Contrary to the negative image of lawyers and district attorneys found in the literature on wife beating, most legal service contracts were rated as very or fairly successful by the battered women. The more difficult and severe the situation, the higher the success ratings given to lawyers and district attorneys by their clients. Despite the generally positive reactions that most beaten women had to lawyers and district attorneys, there were many negative incidents reported, including district attorneys who refused service or discouraged battered women from filing charges, and lawyers who sided with the aggressors or attempted to meet their personal and professional needs at the expense of their clients. These incidents remind us that it would be useful to educate legal professionals about the nature of family violence, the situation and needs of battered women, and the legal and ethical responsibilities that lawyers and district attorneys have when they are contacted by battered women.     

Equal investments,different rewards: gender inequalities among Israeli lawyers

purpose of this paper is to examine empirically whether women in the legal profession in Israel experience discrimination in terms of earnings and career opportunities. The contribution of this study is threefold. On the theoretical level, we added psychological capital and career expectations to the commonly used variables. Second, we focused on an immigrant country in transition towards Westernization that presents an interesting mix of legal equality and traditional family values. Third, our analyses are based on a national mail survey of full-time lawyers in Israel.

The findings of this study show that male lawyers are rewarded better than female lawyers for the number of hours worked per week as well as for their married status. We also found that female lawyers who expected more regarding economic reward earn less, while no relationship was found for male lawyers. Furthermore, the likelihood to attain partnership is much lower for female than for male lawyers after controlling for all relevant variables. The results indicate existence of discrimination.     

Law,culture and massively multiplayer online games

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are now a major international phenomena. Millions of people can play together online, readily navigating boundaries between nations, languages and legal jurisdictions. The communities around some of these games are huge, of a size equivalent to a large city or small nation. This article explores three themes, labelled for conceptual purposes ‘games as legal spaces’, ‘games need lawyers’, and ‘lawyers need games’. It argues that games are inherently legal spaces, infused with legal-ness in a variety of ways; that more direct engagement from the legal community would be of tremendous value in making these systems, and the entertainment spaces which they regulate, ‘better’; and that we have a great deal to learn about law and about the regulation of the online space from games. The article concludes with the proposition that there is an opportunity for impactful knowledge exchange between legal scholars, MMOG developers and publishers, and the gaming community.     

A century of the law profession in Palestine: quo vadis?

The main challenge encountered by the law profession in Palestine throughout its 100-year history is the division over political lines. The split started with the establishment of the Palestinian Jewish and Arab Bar Associations under British rule before 1948. The division took another form of separation between Palestinian lawyers in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel between 1948 and 1967. Under Israeli occupation (1967–1994), lawyers were partitioned into three factions: striking lawyers who affiliated with the Jordanian Bar Association, practicing lawyers who formed the Arab Lawyers Union, and the Gaza lawyers who founded the Lawyers Society. Together these three bodies formed the transitional council of a Palestinian Bar in 1997. Since the 2003 Bar election, lawyers have been unified under the Palestinian Bar Association, which has become a well-established body, notwithstanding all the challenges facing not only the law profession but also the country as a whole.     

Boycott,Resistance and the Law: Cause Lawyering in Conflict and Authoritarianism

This article examines the role of cause lawyers in conflicted or authoritarian contexts where the chances of legal victory are often minimal. Drawing upon the literature on resistance, performance, memory studies, legal consciousness and the sociology of lawyers, the paper examines how cause lawyers challenge and subvert power. The paper first explores the tactics and strategies of cause lawyers who boycott legal proceedings and the relationship between such boycotts and broader political struggles, legitimacy and law. It then examines why and how cause lawyers engage in fairly hopeless legal struggles as acts of instrumental resistance (the ‘sand in the cogs’), transforming courts into sites of symbolic resistance, and using law as a form of memory work. The paper argues that boycott of and resistance through the courts can counter the use of law as an instrument of wickedness and a tool of denial and preserves a ‘stubborn optimism’ in the rule of law.     

Lawyers,public relations and the media: a changing barter economy within a community of practice

We set out to explore the consequences of a new encounter between Israeli lawyers and PR people. This encounter occurred within a pre-existing barter economy between lawyers and legal journalists, composed of embedded and direct social ties. Using in-depth interviews and extensive archival research we analyse three strategies used by PR people to position themselves as brokers between lawyers and journalists: (1) commercialising social ties; (2) becoming translators; and (3) presentation of self as media advisors. Discussion centres on the consequences of the emerging barter economy to law and related occupations.     

The Defense Lawyer,the Accused,and the Procurator

As the matter is generally conceived, it is the accused who needs a defense attorney. Of course, it is he who needs a lawyer above all. But lawyers for the defense are no less essential to the Soviet state in its administration of justice. The administration of justice, the prosecution, and the defense are three functions, clearly differentiated from each other, that are implemented respectively by the court, the procuracy, and the institution of advocates. Together, they are called upon to assure the smooth functioning of the mechanism of struggle against crime.     

Revolution and the Collective Action of the French, American, and English Legal Professions

The French, American, and English legal professions are compared in terms of four common goals: to control admission and training, to protect their jurisdiction, to regulate the behavior of their members, and to enhance their cooperative status. The varying ways in which revolutionary attacks affected their capacity to realize these goals is traced. It is argued that these attacks, and the way lawyers in these societies recovered from them, largely explain the differences between the three professions in the modem world.     

The Organization of lawyers' Work: Size, Intensity, and Co-Practice of the Fields of Law

Using data from personal interviews with 777 Chicago lawyers, constituting a random cross section of the urban bar, the authors estimate the relative volumes of effort devoted to each of several fields of law, analyze the degree to which practitioners specialize in fields or groups of fields, and examine the patterns of co-practice of the fields. They find that the total effort of the Chicago bar is about evenly divided between work for corporate clients and work for individual clients. They also suggest that, while relatively few lawyers are highly specialized to a particular doctrinal area of the law, most are specialized to the service of the needs of a particular type of client. Exploring possible implications of their findings, the authors speculate that lawyers who are specialized to clients rather than to substantive fields may lack the incentive to devote their resources to the rationalization of legal doctrine.     

北京市律师参政议政现状及反思

随着我国法治化进程的推进,律师群体日益彰显出其在政治生活领域的作用。通过对北京地区98名律师和218名社会公众的问卷调查及对著名参政议政律师、律协的个别访谈可以看到,目前中国律师参政议政的渠道狭窄、障碍重重。应当建立起律师对政治生活的固定性参与制度,更好地发挥律师群体的参政议政功能。     

Barriers to practice by foreign lawyers in Asia – exploring the role of lawyers in society

This paper examines the barriers to legal practice by foreign lawyers in selected Asian jurisdictions, where the boundaries between local lawyers and foreign lawyers are drawn, and why barriers exist. It suggests that many jurisdictions in Asia still consider lawyers to be members of a special profession and are resistant to treating and regulating lawyers as ‘service providers’. In addition, although protectionism is a significant factor behind the barriers to practice by foreign lawyers in many jurisdictions, other factors are relevant, including traditional attitudes towards the role of lawyers based on their traditional role as advocates in a litigious context.     

Infusing Public Law into Privatized Welfare: Lawyers,Economists, and the Competing Logics of Administrative Reform

Along with the trend toward “New Public Management” (NPM) and replacing the legal culture of public bureaucracies with market logic through privatization, we are also witnessing instances of “publicization,” the application of public law norms and mechanisms to privatized services. The article explores the role of government lawyers and economists in the dynamics of these administrative reforms. Using a detailed case study of welfare‐to‐work reform in Israel, it shows that the reconstruction of decision making and accountability patterns under NPM was the result of competing efforts by these professional groups to appropriate the “privatized state” to accord with their own institutional logics and interests. While economists advanced a “market” logic, lawyers tried to reproduce the logic of “law” in the post‐bureaucratic setting. The study demonstrates how eventually public law norms were re‐infused into privatized welfare as a result of the increasing institutional power of the lawyers in the regulatory space, along with wider political and social support for the entrenched legalistic mechanisms of the administrative state. However, in addition to the “battle of norms” between lawyers and economists, there were also concessions that led to the redrawing of the boundaries of public law along more functional, rather than formal, lines.     

Client privilege,compliance and the rule of law: Swedish lawyers and money laundering prevention

Can, and will, lawyers police their clients? This article aims to shed light on the private front-line workers of the Financial Action Task Force on money laundering (FATF). The analysis is based on a study of how Swedish lawyers perceive and handle obligations to police clients within FATF style risk-based anti-money laundering/counter terrorism (AML/CTF) regulation. We find that the lawyers were reluctant to taking on the responsibility for AML/CTF, and that their front-line work was directed towards being compliant enough. Relatedly, we identify several practices of separation that serve to mediate between the conflicting aims and interests in the everyday of this form of private policing. Another finding is that the lawyers by and large position themselves as knowledgeable actors, and view risks of AML/CTF as knowable. Nevertheless, lawyers experienced a principle clash between being ‘not banks’, and being front-line workers for FATF. In particular, the lawyers perceived their role as front-line workers to be more complex due to their professional norms and ethics on client privilege, and what they saw as the proper role of lawyers, being in conflict with the obligation to report clients and their transactions. In concluding, we suggest that paying more attention to the everyday experience of front-line workers when devising regulatory tools may be a way to promote engagement in ‘true’ crime prevention on their part.