Family Values: How Children's Lawyers Can Help Their Clients by Advocating for Parents

Children's lawyers too often view themselves as standing in opposition to parents in dependency proceedings. In this article, the authors argue that child advocates do a disservice to their clients by not using their considerable skills, role advantages, and moral authority to actively help parents. Noting that areas of common ground far exceed those places where the children's bar and the parents' bar might part company, the authors contend that children's lawyers have an obligation to actively fight for parents' rights. In particular, spending time early in a case to ensure that appropriate reunification services are being offered is well worth the investment, as it redounds to the benefit of all parties. Several concrete practice tips are offered regarding how children's lawyers can better serve their clients by regularly advocating for parents.     

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.     

Contingent-Fee Lawyers and Their Clients: Settlement Expectations, Settlement Realities, and Issues of Control in the Lawyer-Client Relationship

One hallmark of Herb Jacob's analyses of criminal courts—extensive consideration of the interaction among actors–was less pronounced in his work on civil justice, which was more focused on institutions and the politics behind the laws that those institutions administered. In the research I report here, my emphasis is squarely on the actors in the civil justice process: the relationship between contingency-fee lawyers and clients, and how that relationship plays out in the settlement process. In Felony Justice, Herb, and his coauthor James Eisenstein, focus on the courtroom workgroup as a case-processing (and, largely, case-settling) machine; clients are relatively peripheral. In my account, clients, both current and future, are extremely important in how the lawyer works to settle cases. In the criminal court workgroup, lawyers do not worry about where future clients will come from because police secure them. In contrast, the contingency-fee lawyer has constant concerns about future clients, and I argue, this concern provides a control over lawyers that prior analyses of the contingency fee have largely missed. This dynamic also may explain why the courtroom workgroups, or court communities, found in the criminal courts do not appear to exist in the civil justice system.     

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.     

中国律师办理跨国商事纠纷札记——从“达娃之争”看中外合资问题

1996年，娃哈哈与法国达能公司、香港百富勤公司共同组建联合公司，共同生产以“娃哈哈”为商标的包括纯净水、八宝粥等在内的产品。娃哈哈占49％的股份，达能与百富勤佔51％的股份。2007年4月3日一篇《宗庆後後悔了》的报道，使达能欲以低价并购娃哈哈39家非合资公司51％股权的事件曝光，并由此开始了达娃之争。     

客户影响与职业主义的相对性：中国精英商务律师的工作

本文是一项关于精英商务律师的职业工作如何被来自不同类型客户的影响所建构的研究。文中所运用的数据,包括对中国六个精英商务律师事务所的24名律师的访谈和作者在其中一个事务所进行的参与观察。对于这些中国精英商务律师事务所而言,外企、国企和民企构成了他们极度多样化的客户类型。相应的,律师的工作变得具有灵活性和适应性,以满足客户的不同要求。同时,客户对于律师职业工作的影响也取决于商务律师事务所里的劳动分工:合伙人对于诊断、推理和治疗的过程具有牢固的控制,因此他们享受着高度的职业自主性,而非合伙律师在其工作场所内基本上被剥夺了这一文化系统,因此.他们的工作就很容易受到客户的影响。于是,客户对于职业工作的影响显现出随着律师的资历加深而逐渐下降的趋势。     

Client Influence and the Contingency of Professionalism: The Work of Elite Corporate Lawyers in China

This study examines how the professional work of elite corporate lawyers is constructed by influence from different types of clients. The data presented include interviews with 24 lawyers from six elite corporate law firms in China and the author's participant-observation in one of the firms. For these elite Chinese corporate law firms, foreign corporations, state-owned enterprises, and private enterprises constitute their extremely diversified client types. Accordingly, lawyers' work becomes flexible and adaptive to accommodate the different demands of the clients. Meanwhile, client influence on lawyers' professional work is mediated by the division of labor within the corporate law firm: whereas partners have solid control over the process of diagnosis, inference, and treatment and thus enjoy a high degree of professional autonomy, associates are largely stripped of this cultural machinery in the workplace, and their work becomes vulnerable to client influence. As a result, client influence on professional work appears to decrease with a lawyer's seniority.     

复调的法治：规则之治与法律家之治

我们应从简单的规则主义法治观转变为复调的法治观。复调的法治观,以规则主义法治观为主旋律,以 法律家之治作为必要的伴奏乐。恰当的法律家之治可以弥补规则主义法治观的局限与不足。     

Nineteenth-Century Lawyers and Railway Capitalism: Historians and the Use of Legal Cases

Abstract

The railway was a key factor in nineteenth-century economic development. R.W. Kostal considered the interaction of the industry with lawyers in his book Law and English Railway Capitalism 1825–1875. Yet his conclusion that the law coped badly with the new industry is vitiated by his failure properly to analyse the way the courts applied legal doctrine. In areas such as preincorporation liability for railway companies’ debts, rating and compulsory purchase, the courts applied well-established principles. Even new law in cases like Priestley v Fowler can only be understood in terms of common law principles.     

律师办理民商案件防范刑事风险刍议

律师对办理刑事案件的风险已有认识．而对办理民商案件的刑事风险却远未引起足够的重视。这些年,已有越来越多的人因民事诉讼被控犯有妨害作证罪及帮助毁灭、伪造证据罪,其中不乏律师。律师办理民商案件还应小心涉嫌扰乱社会秩序罪、非法集会罪、出具证明文件重大失实罪、拒不履行法院判决裁定罪,等等。对民事证据的运用,不但是一个遵守法律,恪守职业道德的问题,也是一个技巧问题．我们应当熟练掌握。     

Policies,Technology and Markets: Legal Implications of Their Mathematical Infrastructures

Law and Critique - The paper discusses legal implications of the expansion of practical uses of mathematics in social life. Taking as a starting point the omnipresence of mathematical...     

Litigation Public Relations: The Lawyers' Duty to Balance News Coverage of Their Clients

As the 20th century began its final decade, litigation public relations was more rigorously condemned than condoned. By the end of the decade, the proliferation of the practice and the failure of the bar and bench to forbid it had made the criticism virtually moot. This article considers whether there is a basis for making the right to practice litigation public relations an obligation to do so. The article concludes that the right properly belongs to clients and not their attorneys, and finds a basis in contract and malpractice law for requiring attorneys to tend to their clients' interests in the court of public opinion as zealously as they do in courts of law.     

Working to Avoid Collateral Emotional Harm to Clients: Cases and Recommendations for the Personal Injury Attorney

Attorneys working in the area of personal injury face complex cases in addition to many potential ethical and practice hazards. They are trained, educated, and have experience in handling and discharging their responsibilities in such cases to the best advantage of their clients, whether plaintiff or defense, while maintaining a professional integrity and appropriate ethical stance. Ideally, personal injury attorneys will practice from a position of virtue, serving their clients in their efforts to recover and regain their quality of life. Nevertheless, factors such as financial and work pressures can intervene, leading to inappropriate conduct that may harm their clients and risk professional alienation and malpractice. In the present article, seven case examples are provided that illustrate how personal injury attorneys working for plaintiffs can act in unethical and harmful ways, ultimately endangering their practice. The article is oriented to attorneys at all phases of their careers and includes recommendations for avoiding the types of harm and unethical practice that have been described. Also, the article presents strategies that psychologists treating these patients can take to remedy further emotional damage to patients.     

实证视角下公诉办案风险成因探析

公诉作为检察机关办理刑事案件的最后一道关口,刑事案件中大量涉检涉诉的矛盾和纠纷集中在公诉环节,公诉部门成为社会矛盾爆发的“集中带”和“突破口”.因此,对公诉办案进行风险评估预警,也就成为当前检察机关推进三项重点工作,防范和化解社会矛盾的重要途径和紧要任务.为此,本文结合温州公诉办案实际,通过实证研究方法层层揭开公诉办案风险成因这一神秘面纱,以期今后对公诉办案风险的化解与应对有所裨益.     

"It's Darwinism – Survival of the Fittest:" How Markets and Reputations Shape the Ways in Which Plaintiffs' Lawyers Obtain Clients

The survival of a plaintiffs' lawyer's practice depends upon the generation of an ongoing flow of clients with injuries that the civil justice system will compensate adequately. If this requirement is not met, lawyers will leave this aspect of the legal market for more promising ones. If they do, legal services for injured people will be diminished as a result. In order to find out how this personal services legal market is defined and developed, we interviewed ninety‐five plaintiffs' lawyers in Texas. These lawyers use four major strategies to get clients: client referrals, lawyer referrals, direct marketing, and other referrals. What any particular lawyer does is shaped by the geographic market from which clients are drawn, and by the lawyer's reputation. Our findings provide fresh insights for the empirical literature on plaintiffs' lawyers, and they provide an empirical context for assessing the potential impact of changes in the civil justice system, like tort reform, on the ability of plaintiffs' lawyers to obtain clients.     

Chapter 9: Handling Interstate Child Custody Cases Involving Adoption,Parents in the Military,and Domestic Violence

This chapter suggests approaches for handling the complex jurisdictional issues that arise in interstate child custody cases involving adoptions, parents in the military, and domestic violence.     

The Multiplicity of Taxpayer Identities and Their Implications for Tax Ethics

It is argued that many social factors (ethics, norms, legitimacy) affecting tax compliance derive their meaning and potency from taxpayers' identities—the way they position themselves socially, relative to other taxpayers and the tax authority. Based on survey data from 965 Australians, the present study investigates taxpayers' identities at three different levels of inclusiveness (personal, subgroup, and national identity) and their implications for tax-ethical attitudes. An inclusive identity in terms of one's nation was related to attitudes most conducive to tax compliance. It is concluded that the concept of identity is key to responsive regulation.