Law Careers and Community Context: A Comparison of Rural and Urban Experience

The legal profession is highly differentiated by practice situation, clientele, and community setting, producing multiple professions within the practice of law. Using community size as the independent variable, this paper argues that the structuringofa legalcareerhas less to do with the commonalities oflegal training or the presumed solidarity ofa learned profession and more to do with the characteristics ofthe communityin whichprofessionalpractice takes root. With a comparative approach, usingdata selected from a sample ofrural lawyers in communities of 20,000 or less in Missouri, a midsize (150,000) Missouri city, and ametropolitansetting (Chicago), thispaperdemonstrates that law careersaredeeplyrootedin thesocial, economic, andpoliticalcharacteristics oftheircommunities and tend to mirror the dominant local institutions. In largescale settings where the population is broadly stratified, legal careers are distributedwithin aprofessionalhierarchythatmirrors the economic andsocialsetting. Institutionalpractice is the norm while entrepreneurialpractice is experiencedas a residual form. In smaller settings, where populations are more homogeneous and the economic base does not support institutional practice, entrepreneurial practice is the norm. Entrepreneurial careers include diverse clientele, a concentration onpersonalplightmattersanddeep involvementin communityactivities. The community is thus argued to be the prior and fundamental source of structuringfor the professional career oflawyers. It is not surprising that in a country where urbanization has been a primary source ofsocial change over the past century social scientists should focus on cities and their impact on all phases of human experience. This emphasis is certainly true in the study ofthe legal profession. Despite the fact