Using data from a national survey we conducted in 2009 of about 1,500 lawyers and non-lawyers working in China’s legal system, we measure the political values of Chinese lawyers, compare them to various reference populations, and identify some of their sources. We find that, on the whole, Chinese lawyers are strongly inclined toward political reform, attach far greater importance to political r...

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. To quantify this e¤ect, we analyze the earnings and organization of U.S. lawyers and use the equilibrium model of knowledge hierarchies in Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (2006) to assess how much lawyers’producti...

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Many lawyers have been taught statistics at school or university. The conventional teaching of statistics, particularly in “service courses”, leads to lawyers absorbing a number of fallacies. These include: • probability assessments can only be made on the basis of long runs and repeated experiments • there is a distinction between “legal probability” and “mathematical probability”. What lawyer...

In comparative law, there are many situations where the same legal term has different meanings, or where different legal terms have same legal effect. This can often cause confusion to both lawyers and their clients. This confusion most often occurs when civil lawyers have to deal with common law, or aice aersa, when common law lawyers deal with civil law issues. While there are many issues whi...

Lawyers’ contingent fee (CF) rates are rather uniform, often one-third of the recovery. Arguably, this uniformity is a type of anti-competitive pricefixing, which results in clients paying supra-competitive fees. This paper challenges this argument. It shows that uniform CF rates provide clients with an important advantage, as such rates enable them to make a de facto “take-it-orleave-it” offer...

Pediatricians recognize that social and nonmedical factors influence child health and that there are many government programs and laws designed to provide for children's basic needs. However, gaps in implementation result in denials of services, leading to preventable poor health outcomes. Physician advocacy in these arenas is often limited by lack of knowledge, experience, and resources to int...