THE "COOLING OUT" OF LAW STUDENTS: Facilitating Market Cooptation of Future Lawyers

This article is concerned with the ways the law school experience eases entry into a stratified market thereby further compromising adversariness in the American legal process. It identifies some dimensions of legal education, broadly construed, which tend to acclimatize some students to existing realities of the job market. Interpreting interview data gathered from first-year students at the University of Wisconsin—Madison Law School, it suggests that socialization to a professional identity can resemble "cooling out" in the ways it reconciles some to accept any employment in lieu of seeking employment more in tune with their personal goals. Such acclimatization thwarts adversariness because, in accepting the dictates of a stratified market, these lawyers are channeled to serve some interests and people to the disadvantage of others.     

REFLECTIONS ON THE TRUE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SCOTT REPORT FOR GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY

The immediate impact of the Scott report was slight because it had no conclusion and led to no ministerial or other resignations. Reasons for this inconclusiveness were examined, including conventions of the judicial process, the difficulty Scott had in defining the offences he was examining, the slipperiness of those offences as constitutional conventions and Scott's lack of grasp of administrative processes.
Yet his report is a mine of information on problems of accountability in the area of government defence sales. It was atypical in that three departments pursuing four policies between them and with another department as policeman had a locus in the process. Given the nearly 100,000 licences being processed at one time, it was a large, complex and fragmented administrative activity which might easily have resulted in more mishaps than it did.
Despite its special features the author argues that it does provide evidence of six areas of difficulty in government accountability which are also of (growing) relevance outside the area Scott surveyed: how one finds who is responsible for policy and policy change; how accountability is secured where confidentiality is justified for national security or other reasons; how one gets operational accountability for executive operations within departments; the accountability of junior to departmental ministers; of junior to more senior civil servants; and of civil servants to ministers.