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.     

Life space and social networks as political contexts

Based on data collected in the course of the September and November 1980 waves of the National Election Studies, this contextual analysis of interpersonal relations in social networks presents two major findings: First, the neighborhood as a geographical unit does not appear to be a perceptually salient environment for political behavior; and second,particular neighbors, individually linked to a voter, appear to constitute a social network that has an independent impact on partisan affect for the political parties and their candidates as well as on stability or change in vote preferences as the electoral season goes forward. Thus, although the neighborhood appears to be of minor importance as a politicalenvironment, social relations among particular neighbors result in an interpersonalcontext that has an impact on political behavior.This article is being published simultaneously as Chapter 12 in Heinz Eulau,Politics, Self and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress). Copyright 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.     

Discursive Ethics as Constitutional Theory. Neglecting the Creative Role of Economic Liberties?

Habermas' discourse theory stresses the autonomy of public deliberation transcending the spontaneous emergence of private networks of legal relationships between individuals. Only the public discourse which is detached from the inertia of overlapping practical forms of coordination can refer to the ideally designed social work of legitimated interpersonal relationships. The democratic constitution is regarded as a legal institutionalization of the priority of the public forum of discourse. Conceptions related to classical liberalism would question the cognitive potential of public deliberation, and even deny its productivity as a normative frame of reference for (post‐)modern societies which are confronted with the challenge of uncertainty and the continuous process of self‐transformation.     

The ‘true protection’ concept ‐ a comment on Greenaway and Milner

Empirical studies estimating shift‐parameters to evaluate the ‘true protection’ especially for developing countries often reach the result that those parameters have very high values. This study is to show that it is not substitutional relationships but much more the very inflationary monetary policy of many developing countries which forces the shift‐parameters towards one. Moreover it is shown that it makes little sense to distinguish between ‘traditional’ and ‘non‐traditional’ exports and that shift‐parameters are not necessarily stable over time.     

Anwendung des UGB schon aufgrund von Vorbereitungsgeschäften?

Das neue Unternehmensgesetzbuch, in Kraft seit 1. 1. 2007, nimmt von der Anwendung seines Vierten Buchs (Unternehmergesch?fte) diejenigen Gesch?fte einer natürlichen Person aus, welche lediglich die Voraussetzungen für die Aufnahme eines Unternehmensbetriebs iSd § 1 UGB schaffen sollen (§ 343 Abs 3 UGB). Diese Ausnahmeregelung wirft neben der Frage ihres pers?nlichen Anwendungsbereichs die praktisch noch erheblich wichtigere nach ihrer Ausdehnung auf die übrigen Bücher des UGB auf.