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Glass half full : the decline and rebirth of the legal profession
\"The hits keep coming for the American legal profession. Law schools are churning out too many graduates, depressing wages, and constricting the hiring market. Big Law firms are crumbling, as the relentless pursuit of profits corrodes their core business model. Modern technology can now handle routine legal tasks like drafting incorporation papers and wills, reducing the need to hire lawyers; tort reform and other regulations on litigation have had the same effect. As in all areas of today's economy, there are some big winners; the rest struggle to find work, or decide to leave the field altogether, which leaves fewer options for consumers who cannot afford to pay for Big Law. It would be easy to look at these enormous challenges and see only a bleak future, but Ben Barton instead sees cause for optimism. Taking the long view, from the legal Wild West of the mid-nineteenth century to the post-lawyer bubble society of the future, he offers a close analysis of the legal market to predict how lawyerly creativity and entrepreneurialism can save the profession. In every seemingly negative development, there is an upside. The trend towards depressed wages and computerized legal work is good for middle class consumers who have not been able to afford a lawyer for years. The surfeit of law school students will correct itself as the law becomes a less attractive and lucrative profession. As Big Law shrinks, so will the pernicious influence of billable hours, which incentivize lawyers to spend as long as possible on every task, rather than seeking efficiency and economy. Lawyers will devote their time to work that is much more challenging and meaningful. None of this will happen without serious upheaval, but all of it will ultimately restore the health of the faltering profession. A unique contribution to our understanding of the legal crisis, the unconventional wisdom of Glass Half Full gives cause for hope in what appears to be a hopeless situation\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Digital lawyering : technology and legal practice in the 21st century
\"In today's rapidly changing legal landscape, becoming a digital lawyer is vital to success within the legal profession. This textbook provides an accessible and thorough introduction to digital lawyering, present and future, and a toolkit for gaining the key attributes and skills required to utilise technology within legal practice effectively. Digital technologies have already begun a radical transformation of the legal profession and the justice system. Digital Lawyering introduces students to all key topics, from the role of blockchain to the use of digital evidence in courtrooms, supported by contemporary case studies and integrated, interactive activities. The book considers specific forms of technology, such as Big Data, analytics and Artificial Intelligence, but also broader issues including regulation, privacy and ethics. It encourages students to explore the impact of digital lawyering upon professional identity, and to consider the emerging skills and competencies employers now require. Using this textbook will allow students to identify, discuss and reflect on emerging issues and trends within digital lawyering in a critical and informed manner, drawing on both its theoretical basis and accounts of its use in legal practice. Digital Lawyering is ideal for use as a main textbook on modules focused on technology and law, and as a supplementary textbook on modules covering lawyering and legal skills more generally\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Victim advocacy in the courtroom : persuasive practices in domestic violence and child protection cases
This volume examines sentencing hearings in criminal court and the presentation of victim impact statements, as well as child protection cases in juvenile court and the recommendations of guardians ad litem (GALS). Through interviews, observations, and textual analysis, all deeply grounded in an innovative court watch program, the authors illuminate the most effective persuasive practices of victim advocates and GALS as they help protect the rights and needs of victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse. Mary Lay Schuster and Amy D. Propen offer nuanced interpretations of these strategies in the courtroom setting and provide an understanding of how to develop successful advocacy for vulnerable parties in the legal arena.
eBook
The Paradox of Professionalism : Lawyers and the Possibility of Justice
\"This book is about the role of lawyers in constructing a just society. Its central objective is to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between lawyers' commercial aims and public aspirations. Drawing on interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives, it explores whether lawyers can transcend self-interest to meaningfully contribute to systems of political accountability, ethical advocacy and distributional fairness. Its contributors, some of the world's leading scholars of the legal profession, offer evidence that although justice is possible, it is never complete. Ultimately, how much - and what type of - justice prevails depends on how lawyers respond to, and reshape, the political and economic conditions in which they practise. As the essays demonstrate, the possibility of justice is diminished as lawyers pursue self-regulation in the service of power; it is enhanced when lawyers mobilize - in the political arena, workplace and law school - to contest it\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Arguing in Good Faith about the Constitution: Ideology, Methodology, and Reflective Equilibrium
Nearly all of us who participate in constitutional argument in subjective good faith share a second-order methodology of constitutional decision-making—that is, an approach to working out both our first-order theories of constitutional interpretation and our judgments about appropriate results in particular cases. That shared method involves a search for reflective equilibrium between our prior or intuitive methodological assumptions (which sometimes may be vague or indeterminate) and our intuitive judgments concerning the appropriate results in particular cases. If our ex ante methodological theories are under deter minate, reflection on new cases' facts will lead us to specify our premises more fully. Moreover, in instances of initial conflict between judgments of desirable case-specific outcomes and previously adopted methodological commitments, the Reflective Equilibrium Hypothesis advanced in this Essay holds that adjustment can occur on either end. If we argue about constitutional issues in good faith, normally we will adapt our judgments concerning correct results to methodological premises that we have previously endorsed. But sometimes reflection on new cases will provoke an elaboration, qualification, or rethinking of methodological commitments. After advancing the Reflective Equilibrium Hypothesis as an explanatory theory of the main currents of constitutional argumentation, this Essay offers a brief normative defense.
Journal Article
Rhetorical Strategies of Legitimacy
This paper describes the role of rhetoric in legitimating profound institutional change. In 1997, a Big Five accounting firm purchased a law firm, triggering a juris-dictional struggle within accounting and law over a new organizational form, multidisciplinary partnerships. We analyze the discursive struggle that ensued between proponents and opponents of the new organizational form. We observe that such rhetorical strategies contain two elements. First are institutional vocabularies, or the use of identifying words and referential texts to expose contradictory institutional logics embedded in historical understandings of professionalism, one based on a trustee model and the other based on a model of expertise. A second element of rhetorical strategies is theorizations of change by which actors contest a proposed innovation against broad templates or scenarios of change. We identify five such theorizations of change (teleological, historical, cosmological, ontological, and value-based) and describe their characteristics.
Journal Article
IS ORIGINALISM OUR LAW?
This Essay provides a new framework for criticizing originalism or its alternatives—the framework of positive law. Existing debates are either conceptual or normative: They focus either on the nature of interpretation and authority, or on originalism's ability to serve other values, like predictability, democracy, or general welfare. Both sets of debates are stalled. Instead, we ought to ask: Is originalism our law? If not, what isi Answering this question can reorient the debates and allow both sides to move forward. If we apply this positivist framework, there is a surprisingly strong case that our current constitutional law is originalism. First, I argue that originalism can and should be understood inclusively. That is, it permits doctrine like precedent if those doctrines can be justified on originalist grounds. Second, I argue that our current constitutional practices demonstrate a commitment to inclusive originalism. In Supreme Court cases where originalism conflicts with other methods of interpretation, the Court picks originalism. By contrast, none of the Court's putatively anti-originalist cases in fact repudiate originalist reasoning. These judicial practices are reinforced by a broader convention of treating the constitutional text as law and its origin as the framing. So while constitutional practice might seem, on the surface, to be a pluralism of competing theories, its deep structure is in fact a nuancedform of originalism.
Journal Article