Category Archives: Legal Profession
Jul 7, 2022 W. Bradley WendelLegal Profession
Scott Cummings’s new book, An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles, tells five different stories illustrating the role of law and lawyers in securing goods such as economic justice, environmental protection, and the rights of immigrants, in the city of Los Angeles in the years following the 1992 riots. The book is organized around chapters providing comprehensive histories of these campaigns: Reforming sweatshop labor in the garment industry; contesting anti-solicitation ordinances that restricted the ability of mostly Latino day laborers to obtain employment; ensuring living-wage jobs in the wake of gentrification and community redevelopment projects; blocking the development of a Wal-Mart supercenter that would have undermined unionization in the grocery industry; and improving labor and environmental conditions for truck drivers at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
In his most recent Netflix special, all-time-great comedian Chris Rock observes: “[W]hen you’re in a band, you have roles that you play in the band. Sometimes, you sing lead. And sometimes, you’re on tambourine. And if you’re on tambourine, play it right. Play it right. Play it with a . . . smile, because no one wants to see a mad tambourine player.” Rock uses this as an extended metaphor for relationships, but at the risk of wrenching it too far out of context, the comparison can also apply to the role of public interest lawyers in social movements. Some lawyers may aspire to be the lead singer, but the interests of justice may be better served by lawyers playing a supporting role, and playing it well. Continue reading "Lawyers Playing Tambourine"
Jun 6, 2022 Melissa MortazaviLegal Profession
In today’s political climate, railing against the intellectual (not economic) elite has reached an anti-expertise fever pitch. It might be tempting in this climate to dismiss Benjamin Barton’s forthcoming book, The Credentialed Court: Inside the Cloistered Elite World of American Justice, as just another such diatribe. It is not. Instead, Barton’s book proves what scholars have long intuited: that while the Supreme Court facially appears more diverse than in the past, in other ways the court has rarely been so homogenous. Plus, it is such a juicy and delightful read you won’t feel like you’re reading for work.
Ben Barton’s book is a combination of straightforward data and entertaining storytelling. The first few chapters are a delicious highlights reel of the early Supreme Court appointees, full of colorful detail and choice tidbits—from a pro-football player to the story of a self-made immigrant who rocked the constitutional convention, won George Washington’s trust, and married into a prominent family – why it’s the stuff musicals are made of (hint: it’s not Alexander Hamilton)! Barton presents all this to argue that past Supreme Court Justices weren’t uniformly studious or bookish but zany, original, and more accomplished in other fields. Continue reading "Homogenous Diversity"
May 5, 2022 Francesca BartlettLegal Profession
Across the world, millions of women experiencing violence and coercive control by an intimate partner turn to the law for help. Lawyers and justice systems ill-equipped to deal with this complex issue are often accused of missing, and even compounding, harms. Heather Douglas’s Women, Intimate Partner Violence, and the Law documents her study of this phenomenon. Her book is based on the results of a four-year study in which she conducted up to three interviews (n =178 interviews in total) with 65 female survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Australia. Douglas sought survivors of differing backgrounds. All of the women Douglas interviewed had experienced a range of abuse from their partners, with 85% experiencing physical violence, and all some form of emotional or psychological abuse. For most of the women, the abuse continued after they left their partners, often during the study and in their interactions within the legal system. Financial abuse through actions that compound the cost of accessing the law emerges as a key theme.
Applying a feminist methodology, the book tells extended stories of women experiencing IPV. Through the perspectives of these women, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the system they encounter (child protection services, policing, courts, lawyers, and judges). The system-wide insights of this very well researched book cannot be canvassed here. Rather, this review considers the IPV survivors’ perspectives on Australian lawyers’ work. Douglas’s longitudinal approach provides an opportunity to hear how the women “construct their narratives about their interaction with the legal system and its actors and how this changes over time.” (P. 13.) What we read are “journeys [that] were harrowing, long, and expensive” (P. 2) and stories that illustrate the “messiness of the law.” (P. 6.) For example, Alex (not her real name) carefully recorded that she was required to attend civil and criminal courts on 31 occasions over a 6-month period. (P. 65.) The trauma experienced by Alex and many other women is exacerbated by the actions of their partner in filing unmeritorious applications, appeals or causing excessive delays through adjournments. The interviewees saw these as tactics motivated by a wish to control and abuse–“The courtroom is his playground,” Sandra said. (P. 166.) Douglas describes this as the “weaponization” of the legal system. (P. 182.) Continue reading "Weaponizing The Law and the Cost of Lawyers in Intimate Partner Violence Actions"
Mar 31, 2022 Amy SalyzynLegal Profession
Rima Sirota,
Can Continuing Legal Education Pass the Test? Empirical Lessons from the Medical World,
Notre Dame J. L., Ethics & Pub. Pol’y (forthcoming 2022), available at
Georgetown Scholarly Commons.
Mandatory continuing legal education (MCLE) is one of the most ubiquitous regulatory measures aimed at ensuring continuing lawyer competence. It is also one of the most critiqued. Over the past several decades, many lawyers and academics have argued that MCLE should be reformed, if not abolished. While MCLE requirements have so far largely withstood these attacks, recently, lawyer regulators seem to have developed a new appetite for doing things differently. A recent international survey of approaches to lawyer continuing competence observed, “lawyer regulators around the world have sought to improve the ability of CPD [continuing professional development] to improve competence in a number of different ways, increasingly moving away from a generic durational requirement.”
In light of these developments, Rima Sirota’s article, Can Continuing Legal Education Pass the Test? Empirical Lessons from the Medical World, is a timely contribution to the literature on lawyer regulation. Speaking of the American context, Sirota argues that “the mandatory CLE system in its current state is indefensible” given its high costs and the lack of empirical evidence suggesting that CLE leads to improved lawyer competence. (P. 3.) While others have previously made this general point, Sirota’s contribution stands out for her call to the legal profession “to take up the empirical challenge” of measuring CLE outcomes and her provision of a roadmap on how this could be done. (P. 45.) Moreover, the comparative approach taken by Sirota, which looks to the medical profession’s approach to continuing education for potential insights, provides a fresh take on long-standing concerns about MCLE in the legal profession. Continue reading "Taking Up the Challenge: A Roadmap for Studying the Effectiveness of Mandatory Continuing Legal Education"
Mar 31, 2022 Amy SalyzynLegal Profession
Rima Sirota,
Can Continuing Legal Education Pass the Test? Empirical Lessons from the Medical World,
Notre Dame J. L., Ethics & Pub. Pol’y (forthcoming 2022), available at
Georgetown Scholarly Commons.
Mandatory continuing legal education (MCLE) is one of the most ubiquitous regulatory measures aimed at ensuring continuing lawyer competence. It is also one of the most critiqued. Over the past several decades, many lawyers and academics have argued that MCLE should be reformed, if not abolished. While MCLE requirements have so far largely withstood these attacks, recently, lawyer regulators seem to have developed a new appetite for doing things differently. A recent international survey of approaches to lawyer continuing competence observed, “lawyer regulators around the world have sought to improve the ability of CPD [continuing professional development] to improve competence in a number of different ways, increasingly moving away from a generic durational requirement.”
In light of these developments, Rima Sirota’s article, Can Continuing Legal Education Pass the Test? Empirical Lessons from the Medical World, is a timely contribution to the literature on lawyer regulation. Speaking of the American context, Sirota argues that “the mandatory CLE system in its current state is indefensible” given its high costs and the lack of empirical evidence suggesting that CLE leads to improved lawyer competence. (P. 3.) While others have previously made this general point, Sirota’s contribution stands out for her call to the legal profession “to take up the empirical challenge” of measuring CLE outcomes and her provision of a roadmap on how this could be done. (P. 45.) Moreover, the comparative approach taken by Sirota, which looks to the medical profession’s approach to continuing education for potential insights, provides a fresh take on long-standing concerns about MCLE in the legal profession. Continue reading "Taking Up the Challenge: A Roadmap for Studying the Effectiveness of Mandatory Continuing Legal Education"
Feb 22, 2022 Richard MoorheadLegal Profession
In a Tai Chi exercise, two people stand face to face, each with one palm outstretched an inch or two apart. One person moves their hand and the other seeks to follow it wordlessly. The exercise is designed to produce a feeling of the energy flowing mysteriously between two people. I was reminded of this exercise when reading Meredith Rossner’s article on remote courts which moves deftly between the sociology of co-presence, ritual, and entrainment, which is “the synchronization of mutual attention, emotion, and behaviour,” to test the potential of virtual justice.
Rossner argues virtual courts can “translate,” improve, and sometimes “completely reimagine” court ritual. The article illustrates some paths to be taken between tech evangelism and traditionalism. It shows how thoughtful and well-researched court design can (sometimes) allow remote justice to emulate and improve upon physical courtrooms. Material and symbolic court rituals can be translated into virtual contexts in ways more egalitarian and inclusive than the austere grandeur of higher courts and the dilapidated functionalism of everyday courts. Continue reading "Designing Rituals in the World of Virtual Courts"
Jan 21, 2022 Robert GordonLegal Profession
This mammoth (858 page) book, The Intellectual Sword: Harvard Law School, The Second Century, is the sequel to the same authors’ On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, The First Century. That volume broke the boundaries of conventional institutional histories, which are mostly coffee-table celebrations of successive deans and of the buildings erected during their tenure. The authors situated the Harvard Law School (HLS) in the middle of ferocious party-political struggles and the Civil War. They produced the most thorough and searching description and analysis of C.C. Langdell’s famous experimental reforms of the 1870s and 80s in legal education. And they advanced the argument—pursued at much greater length in their new book—that HLS set the template not just for legal, but for professional education generally in the 20th century.
The structural argument. The central argument of the book is that financial structure determined the character and destiny not only of HLS and other American law schools, but to some extent of medical and business schools as well. HLS from the start was locked into a syndrome of dependence on tuition for revenue, which meant that it had to admit a large number of students. To service those students, it had to hire more faculty and acquire more building space, to pay for which it needed to continue to keep its enrollments high. At the same time, to maintain quality and plausibly certify its graduates as the cream of meritocratic competition, it had to flunk out many of the entering class and ruthlessly sort and rank those who remained. The results of high enrollments were very large faculty-student ratios and large classes, dependent on teacher interactions with the most aggressive and articulate students in them to keep Socratic dialogue going; a harsh boot-camp training method, leading to Darwinian competition; equation of “merit” (universal legal competence) with performance on first-year exams, and demoralization and alienation of the non-elite students. Continue reading "Harvard’s Model of Legal Education"
Jan 21, 2022 Robert GordonLegal Profession
This mammoth (858 page) book, The Intellectual Sword: Harvard Law School, The Second Century, is the sequel to the same authors’ On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, The First Century. That volume broke the boundaries of conventional institutional histories, which are mostly coffee-table celebrations of successive deans and of the buildings erected during their tenure. The authors situated the Harvard Law School (HLS) in the middle of ferocious party-political struggles and the Civil War. They produced the most thorough and searching description and analysis of C.C. Langdell’s famous experimental reforms of the 1870s and 80s in legal education. And they advanced the argument—pursued at much greater length in their new book—that HLS set the template not just for legal, but for professional education generally in the 20th century.
The structural argument. The central argument of the book is that financial structure determined the character and destiny not only of HLS and other American law schools, but to some extent of medical and business schools as well. HLS from the start was locked into a syndrome of dependence on tuition for revenue, which meant that it had to admit a large number of students. To service those students, it had to hire more faculty and acquire more building space, to pay for which it needed to continue to keep its enrollments high. At the same time, to maintain quality and plausibly certify its graduates as the cream of meritocratic competition, it had to flunk out many of the entering class and ruthlessly sort and rank those who remained. The results of high enrollments were very large faculty-student ratios and large classes, dependent on teacher interactions with the most aggressive and articulate students in them to keep Socratic dialogue going; a harsh boot-camp training method, leading to Darwinian competition; equation of “merit” (universal legal competence) with performance on first-year exams, and demoralization and alienation of the non-elite students. Continue reading "Harvard’s Model of Legal Education"
Dec 15, 2021 Vivien HolmesLegal Profession
When Stephen Vaughan and Emma Oakley interviewed 57 lawyers in elite London firms, they were struck by a general ethical apathy. They explore this apathy in their well-known article, “Gorilla Exceptions” and the Ethically Apathetic Corporate Lawyer, and conclude that a strong justification for this apathy, in the minds of the lawyers interviewed, is the standard conception of legal ethics. The standard conception excuses lawyers from moral accountability for clients’ actions, holding that it is not the role of lawyers to judge the morality (as opposed to the legality) of clients’ actions. For the lawyers interviewed this justification, invoked most commonly in relation to criminal defence lawyers litigating within the confines of the adversary system, held, even though most if not all of them were engaged in transnational legal work, the consequences of which have effect across the world.
Cesar Arjona’s article, The Usage of What Country: A Critical Analysis of Legal Ethics in Transnational Legal Practice, questions whether the standard conception holds up in relation to transnational legal work. You may think you’ve heard all there is to hear about the standard conception, but I urge you to read Ajona’s article. He revisits the constitutive assumptions of the standard conception and asks whether those assumptions remain valid when applied to transnational practice. Spoiler, they don’t. Continue reading "Transnational Lawyers Need to Rethink their Legal Ethics"
Nov 17, 2021 Carole SilverLegal Profession
For many—perhaps most—law students, law school is hard and stressful; legal practice is similarly experienced by many lawyers. The stress of these environments can act as an incubator for mental health problems, which often are buried by lawyers and law students, occasionally surfacing in stories of anxiety, substance abuse, addiction, depression and suicide, among other things. At the same time, however, law students report high levels of satisfaction with law school and their career decision, as do lawyers, which complicates understanding the mental health trend. This paradox calls for new thinking about mental illness in law school and the profession, which Kathryne Young’s article, Understanding the Social and Cognitive Processes in Law School That Create Unhealthy Lawyers (Understanding Unhealthy Lawyers), pursues. It offers a different lens for understanding these issues by directing attention to how the organizational policies and structure of legal education negatively impact law students’ well-being and, ultimately, their mental health.
Young is particularly well qualified to address this topic, having written a popular book on law student happiness (How to be Sort of Happy in Law School (2018)). But while the book is a how-to for students, Understanding Unhealthy Lawyers frames the wellness and mental health problem in relation to the organizational structure of law school, and invites law schools and faculty members to reconsider certain longstanding and widespread policies and practices in legal education. Continue reading "Rethinking Fundamentals? Law School and Mental Health"
