Lawyers as Social Engineers: How Lawyers Should Use Their Social Capital to Achieve Economic Justice

Lawyers, Legislation and Social Welfare

Efficiency considerations have played an increasing role in the development of legal doctrine over the last decades. Our paper investigates the consequences of the efficiency doctrine for the long run allocation of human resources between the legal profession and other professional activities. It is argued that a short run pursuit of the efficient scope of legislation may create an inefficient ...

Net law - how lawyers use the internet

Should Lawyers Care About Philosophy?

Philosophy and justice have always had a rocky relationship. Socrates, remember, was put to death for teaching young people to question received wisdom on matters of public importance. 2 Yet his pupil Plato dared to maintain that philosophers possessed ways of thinking that could help answer our most puzzling questions about the nature of both truth and justice. This is our paradox: Sometimes o...

The Lawyers' Art: "Representation" in Capital Cases

Tort Reform and Access to Justice: How Legal Environments Shape Lawyers’ Case Selection

How do lawyers decide which cases to accept? Previous studies suggest that they use a simple risk/return formula to make such decisions. I argue, however, that legal environments also shape lawyers’ decisions. Analyses of in-depth interviews with lawyers across four states demonstrate that lawyers make different decisions about cases in different legal environments. Lawyers in states without to...