The part-time employment of full-time law students is a significant aspect of contemporary legal education. Successful socialization and training in law are presumed to require the undivided time, effort, and commitment of students. Part-time employment, therefore, is commonly believed to siphon those scarce personal resources away from the central task of legal education. This multi-school study of a sample of 1,370 law students attempted to determine the significant ways in which employed students were differentiated from nonemployed classmates in finances, attitudes, and uses of time, and whether type of law school and student's year in school had effects on patterns of student employment.

The incidence of part-time employment, while strongly related to personal financial resources, was found to be equally influenced by the type of school attended and year in school. While those settings varied substantially in the degree of permissiveness toward student part-time employment, students employed part time could not be distinguished statistically from their nonemployed classmates in terms of levels of involvement in law school or their levels of morale. Both temporal and attitudinal disengagement from law school were found to be commonplace among upper-class students in all school settings, but part-time employment did not appear to contribute to it uniquely.

The last thirty years in anthropology, as well as in linguistics and in many of the other social sciences, have been characterized by a shift in theoretical focus from structure to practice. In The Language of Law School: Learning to “Think Like a Lawyer” (2007), linguistic anthropologist and law professor Elizabeth Mertz has brought this practice perspective to bear on the extraordinary linguistic and cultural venue that is the first‐year law school classroom. In revealing the linguistic realities of teaching new students to “think like a lawyer,” she raises fascinating questions about the relationship between language and thought, the subtle effects of legal education, and the nature of law itself.

Contemporary Law and Society scholars emphasize focused study of “law and the economy” yet empirical work on the legal implications of important economic transformations of the late twentieth century is limited. To address this issue, I analyze Canadian wrongful dismissal claims heard to judgment between 1981 and 1997 to understand how judges grappled with contradictions that arose between classic legal doctrine on the employment relationship, unstable economic conditions that limited employment opportunities for plaintiffs, and new business ideologies about employee expendability and flexibility. Findings demonstrate that judicial rhetoric was attentive to the contradictions that arose with the new economy, and unique responses were developed. These responses, however, varied according to specific socioeconomic contexts embedded within the seventeen‐year period under study. I conclude by suggesting the development of more dynamic theories of law and the economy to capture the ways in which law shifts in response to changing economic contexts.

A criminal jury of fewer than 6 members and a jury in which 5 out of 6 can find a verdict were held unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court for failing to meet the requirements of due process as mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment. In four states—Michigan is one of them—the 5 out of 6 jury is the standard civil jury. Two questions are raised: first, whether such a jury violates the Michigan state constitution; second, whether such a 5 out of 6 civil jury violates the federal Constitutiton even though the civil jury is not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Police custodial violence was a normal occurrence in the southern Indian province of Madras through the twentieth century, across the colonial and postcolonial periods alike. While governmental authorities attributed torture to individual deviants and the press attributed the practice to a lack of government will in punishing offenders, this article locates police impunity in broader structures of power that permeated society. Specifically, it shows how the deployment of seemingly objective forms of evidence in adjudicating cases of torture—the testimony of respectable persons, medical expertise, and police writing—discounted the voices of victims of violence, reaffirming instead policing’s alignment with class, caste, and gendered authority. Equally, the very act of witnessing produced some subjects as socially privileged by virtue of their respectable status, their expertise, or their literacy, further separating them from bodies that were vulnerable to state violence. Police sovereign power within the station was thus constituted in conjunction with disciplinary power across society.

The American Bar Association's Commission on Evaluation of Professional Standards has proposed the replacement of the existing Code of Professional Responsibility with its Model Rules of Professional Conduct. The public discussion of the Model Rules has focused largely on specific provisions, such as the proposed requirement that lawyers disclose clients' confidences in some circumstances and the exhortation that all lawyers engage in pro bono activity. Another proposed change, however, would at least on its face seem to be more significant for the future of the bar's professional standards and its self-concept than for the resolution of particular professional dilemmas. That change is the proposed elimination of about half the current Code of Professional Responsibility: those provisions included under the rubric “Ethical Considerations.”

The American Bar Association is considering a revision of its Code of Professional Responsibility. One revision deals specifically with lawyers whose clients are organizations; it attempts to delineate the ethical responsibilities of such lawyers when they discover an employee or a member of one of their clients is engaged in wrongdoing on the organization's behalf. Because the proposal suggests that corporate counsel may be justified in public disclosure of the wrongdoing when the organization itself fails to rectify the problem, it has sparked much controversy in the profession and much speculation as to whether and when corporate counsel will “blow the whistle.” The article offers a sociological perspective on the act of a corporate counsel's public disclosure of organizational wrongdoing. The act of disclosure is treated as a social behavior, the likelihood of which is increased or decreased by a number of factors including the attorney's awareness of the wrongdoing, the attorney's orientations to the larger profession, the structure of the professional practice setting within which the counsel is located, and the supports for disclosure offered by the legal profession through its formal organizations. These factors are described and then combined into a general predictive model of disclosure by corporate counsel. A concluding discussion of the general ramifications of the proposed revisions focuses on the social implications of the attorney-client privilege, in which the client is as unique an actor as is the large organization.

The people's sense of what is good and right is both the ultimate source and the ultimate strength of the rules that govern a democratic society. If there is a major discrepancy between that sense and the rules, the rules and those who cling to them will eventually disappear.

A long accepted canon of professional ethics forbids a lawyer to appear in a particular matter in the dual role of advocate and witness for his client. As Disciplinary Rule 5-101(B) of the American Bar Association's Code of Professional Responsibility states:

The third report in a study of career-relevant changes in interests, attitudes, and personality characteristics among first-year law students at Brigham Young University, this article examines the impacts of five kinds of possible causes of interest changes. The author elaborates what it means to say that a career-relevant interest has “changed” in light of changes due in part to both reconceptions of the content of law and of the demands and rewards of various work settings and to changes in the students' conceptions of themselves which carry with them changes in career interests.

Critics have long maintained that the rights revolution and, by extension, the postwar turn to litigation as a regulatory tool, are the product of a cynical legislative choice. On this view, legislators choose rights and litigation over alternative regulatory approaches to shift costs from on-budget forms (for example, publicly funded social provisions, public enforcement actions by prosecutors or agencies) to off-budget forms (for example, rights-based statutory duties, enforced via private lawsuits). This “cost-shift” theory has never been subjected to sustained theoretical scrutiny or comprehensive empirical test. This article offers the first such analysis, examining a context where the cost-shift hypothesis is at its most plausible: disability discrimination laws, which shift costs away from social welfare programs by requiring that employers hire and “accommodate” workers with disabilities. Using a novel dataset of state-level disability discrimination laws enacted prior to the federal-level Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and a range of archival and other materials drawn from state-level legislative campaigns, we find only limited support for the view that cost shifting offered at least part of the motivation for these laws. Our findings offer a fresh perspective on long-standing debates about American disability law and politics, including judicial interpretation of the ADA and its state-level analogues and the relationship of disability rights activism to other rights-based political movements.

This article is a story about tetherings, a concept that illuminates the power of law in the relational dynamics of individual-family-state. The concept emerges from my qualitative study of parental maintenance litigation in Taiwan over the provision of financial support to troublous parents, who mistreated their children when they were young. Troubled parental maintenance litigation arises when nobody wants to look after these elderly people, and the state restricts their access to social welfare by holding their estranged children financially responsible. Such litigation leads to empowerments and disempowerments for litigants, as well as legal reform and detriments for the state. Bridging sociolegal scholarship on continuing relations with feminist vulnerability theory, “tetherings” is both an empirical and a normative concept concerned with the relational nature of power, and the openness of humans and institutions to harms and other changes. The concept is empirical, being the paradigm through which I trace disputes and other relational processes of individual-family-state; it is normative because my empirical analysis aims to expose the state’s workings and detail how people respond to law and power that binds them to one another and the state. “Tetherings” advances feminist vulnerability theory and offers a circumspectly optimistic view on the potential of law.

The probability that an event will avalanche into an impairment of essential services constitutes a “systemic risk.” Owing to the inherent complexities of modern societies, the outbreak of a novel disease or the failure of a financial institution can rapidly escalate into an impact significantly larger than the initial event. Through the lens of complex system theory, this article draws a parallel between financial crises and disasters to contend that the regulatory framework for financial systemic risk is unequipped to address its fundamental dynamics. Epitomized by the market failure rationale, financial regulation is premised on a reductionist view that purports both systemic risk and law as external to the actions of market participants. Conversely, this article advances a twofold conceptual framework. First, it shows that systemic risk emerges from the same complex dynamics that generate the financial system. Second, it understands law as an agent of complexity, thus contributing to the emergence of finance and its inherent instability. Normatively, this conceptual framework reveals the limits of current regulatory approaches and constructs a holistic risk governance framework that is akin to the one adopted to govern disaster risks.

This article uses evidence from Tanzanian lawyers and legal experts to advance a novel lawyer-centered explanation for Tanzania’s low levels of rights litigation. Like in many countries, Tanzanian citizens who pursue litigation depend on the presence, ideas, and guidance of lawyers. To understand patterns of litigation in Tanzania, therefore, we need to understand how lawyers make choices about their cases. Such knowledge is crucial to understanding litigation in Tanzania and in many other countries where lawyers bear similar responsibility in determining patterns of litigation. Here, I argue that three factors—legal education, laws and institutions, and judicial receptivity—dissuade lawyers from making rights-based arguments in cases where they might be appropriate. Lawyers’ avoidance of rights-based arguments in turn leads to low levels of rights litigation in Tanzania.