The Dimensions of Lawyer-Client Relations: Notes Toward a Theory and a Field Study

Recent research on lawyer-client relations has called into question the traditional image of the lawyer as the autonomous professional. This research note reviews this research and proposes a three-dimensional framework for interpreting lawyer-client relationships. The utility of the framework is illustrated using data collected through interviews with corporate lawyers and their clients in Toronto.     

Bringing Back the States: A Congressional Perspective on the Fall of Slavery in America

In the aftermath of America's Civil War, national lawmakers who chronicled the fall of slavery described the North as a terrain of states whose representatives assembled in Congress, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–77) and Alexander Stephens’s A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–70). Beginning in the early 1900s, scholars who helped establish the field of American constitutional history redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–1877) and Alexander Stephens's A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–1870), a first generation of scholars writing during the Progressive Era redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in William A. Dunning's Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (1898), John W. Burgess's The Civil War and the Constitution (1901–1906), and James G. Randall's Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (1926). Although a second generation of scholars uncovered traces of the lawmakers' perspective of states, new efforts in the wake of the civil rights movement to understand the internal workings of political parties and the contributions of ordinary Americans kept the study of national lawmakers and their states on the margins of inquiry, as evidenced in leading revisionist histories of Reconstruction, including Harold Hyman's A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (1973), Michael Les Benedict's A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (1974a), and Eric Foner's Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution (1988). Today, the terrain of Northern states remains in the backdrop, as illustrated in recent studies featuring the wartime national government, including James Oakes's Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012) and Mark E. Neely, Jr.'s Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (2011), as well as studies of the mechanisms of constitutional change during Reconstruction, including relevant sections of Bruce Ackerman's We the People II: Transformations (1998) and Akhil Reed Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography (2005). This review essay argues that incorporating the states back into this century‐old framework will open new lines of inquiry and provide a more complete account of federalism's role in the fall of slavery. In particular, a return to the archives suggests that in the uncertain context of mid‐nineteenth‐century America, slavery's leading opponents in Congress saw the Constitution's federal logic not simply as an obstacle, but as a crucial tool with which to mobilize collective action and accommodate wartime opposition at a time when no one could say for sure what would remain of the United States.     

Intuitive Practice by Municipal Controllers

The restrictions placed by New Public Management on the work of municipal controllers raise questions regarding if and when these public controllers can make effective use of their intuition. A study has been carried out to answer these questions. Intuition in this study is defined as a ‘non-conscious process involving holistic associations that are produced rapidly, which result in affectively charged judgments’. While experience deals with known facts, intuition focuses on new ones. The study was carried out in the form of a simulation in which municipal controllers were asked to analyse the financial situation of a fictional municipality. Afterwards the participants were presented with four factors and were instructed to indicate which factor had been decisive in the financial process. Two factors required extensive experience as a municipal controller, while one factor required the use of intuition. The initial expectation was that experienced controllers would make more use of their intuition. Another supposition was that the use of intuition would increase with increasing time pressure. The research has shown that good use of intuition does indeed require experience. Thus, experienced public controllers make more and better use of their intuition than their less experienced colleagues. In addition, the use of intuition increases with the decrease in time available for analysis, but experience plays a crucial role in this respect. Further, the study reaches the conclusion that intuition and rational analysis do not so much exclude as complement each other. A good use of intuition requires considerable experience in rational analysis. Finally, the results of the study demonstrate that the use of intuition does not lead to worse decisions than those made using rational analysis.