In a series of influential papers, Lester Brickman (2003a, 2003b, 2004) has argued that the income and effective hourly rate of tort lawyers using contingent fees has increased by 1400% since 1960 and that the market for contingent fee lawyers is uncompetitive as evidenced by lack of price advertising and uniform pricing across practitioners, cases and time. He also argues that contingent fee l...

before constitution revolution, advocacy in our country governed by islamic law and lawyers introduced as a free profession in means of that law. after that revolution the government promulgated some rules for its regulation as an official profession. by act of bar association independence, this profession declared independent. many lawyers after islamic revolution have been filtrated and by th...

This paper explores whether lawyers can understand and apply the criminal burden of proof, and whether they are able to make the sort of likelihood estimates that the expert witness suggested would help the jurors in the case of R v Adams. The English Court of Appeal expressly rejected the use of mathematical formulae to determine guilt or innocence. With this kind of restraining judgment, it i...

This paper considers how US courts, which regulate the US legal profession, should respond to the perceived excess of lawyers (i.e. to the lack of adequate employment opportunities for lawyers). It begins by summarizing the courts’ regulatory role. It then situates the contemporary flood-of-lawyers problem in the unavailability of well-paid legal work, not in the absence of a need for lawyers’ ...

Hierarchies allow individuals to leverage their knowledge through others’time. This mechanism increases productivity and ampli…es the impact of skill heterogeneity on earnings inequality. This paper analyzes the earnings and organization of U.S. lawyers and uses an equilibrium model of knowledge hierarchies inspired by Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (2006) to assess how much lawyers’productivity a...

BACKGROUND Self-employed workers experience occupational stress and may suffer from various mental health disorders. AIMS To assess the mental health, substance use and risk factors for psychological distress in a sample of self-employed lawyers and pharmacists. METHODS A cross-sectional study, using self-completion postal questionnaires, of lawyers and pharmacists. The General Health Quest...

A report on the 5th Internet, Law and Politics conference hosted by the UOC in July 2009. The author, who attended the conference as rapporteur and wrote a ‘live blog’ during the two-day event, reviews some of the contributions, reflects on the theme of social networking sites (‘pro or con?’) and explores the different approaches of the disciplines of law and of political science, suggesting th...

This paper examines the interest of lawyers as a group in the level of legal complexity, assuming that lawyers prefer the level of legal complexity that maximizes their total income. I focus on aspects of the law that are the same across all cases in a particular legal field, such as the rule determining whether the defendant is liable or guilty, the rules of procedure, and the scope of damages...

Divorce and the Excess Burden of Lawyers We present a model where divorcing spouses can choose to hire lawyers in their divorce process. Spouses encounter incentives as in the classical prisoners’ dilemma: Despite the zero sum nature of the game and the lawyers’ fees, each spouse has an incentive to hire a lawyer. We propose a simple institutional setting allowing for joint lawyers in order to ...