This is a time of enormous challenge for the legal profession and the system of justice. The American Bar Foundation is conducting research that directly addresses many of these challenges. (Jump to 2010 Highlights)
The global financial crisis that began in 2008 had dramatic short-term effects on several sectors of the legal profession, from law schools to law firms to the fiscal strength of our courts. Scholars of the legal profession are debating what the long-term effects of the economic shock will be. Does it portend a radical restructuring of law partnerships or the careers of lawyers? Do these changes have greater effects on some groups than others, such as minority lawyers or women? Will the changes in the legal marketplace force a rethinking of legal education or how it is financed?
As the leading source of research on the legal profession, the ABF is informing the debates around these important questions. The ABF’s After the JD Project is tracking the professional lives of a large national sample of lawyers who passed the bar in the year 2000. After conducting interviews with this group in 2003 and 2007, the project has secured funding for a third wave of interviews in 2012. The next set of interviews will reveal the effects of changes in the profession on this cohort of lawyers, and will allow unprecedented comparisons across race and ethnicity, gender, law school, and geographic location.
ABF projects are examining the changing shape of public interest law practice, a sector which faces increasing financial pressures due to changes in fee-shifting rules, limitations on supported activities, and problems of attorney frustration and burnout. A new research initiative on access to justice promises to offer insights into both the supply of and demand for legal services for Americans across the income spectrum.
ABF research continues to shape debates about the future of legal education. From in-depth studies of how law school shapes the thinking of law students, to research on what law graduates found valuable in legal education after they began practice, to studies of whether women and minority law professors felt fairly treated in the law school tenure process, ABF research is making a unique contribution to the dialogue about changes in the legal academy.
In these and other areas of the ABF research program, the hallmark of ABF research is independence, rigor, and relevance. Work of such quality would not be possible without the longstanding support of the American Bar Endowment and the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation. Their support has allowed us to recruit and retain the world’s leading faculty conducting advanced research on law. Our fellowship programs for undergraduate and graduate students is passing on the heritage of innovative research to new generations of scholars.
I hope the pages that follow capture some of the excitement and significance of the research being conducted at the American Bar Foundation. We feel privileged to be conducting research that offers new understandings of law and how it might be shaped to better serve the interests of justice.
Robert L. Nelson
Director and MacCrate Research Chair in the Legal Profession
American Bar Foundation and Northwestern University
Highlights
At the 2010 Law and Society Association Meetings, held in May in Chicago, ABF scholars received significant recognition. ABF Research Professor Shari Seidman Diamond received the Harry Kalven, Jr. Prize from the Law and Society Association for “empirical scholarship that has contributed most effectively to the advancement of research in law and society.” Diamond is a widely recognized expert in law and psychology who has conducted pathbreaking research on juries.
L to R: Tino Cuéllar, Shari Diamond, Heather Schoenfeld,
Laura Gomez, Robert Nelson
The awards ceremony held another ABF highlight, as the keynote speaker was Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar, a Stanford Law professor who was on leave as a Special Assistant to the President for Justice and Regulatory Policy, White House Domestic Policy Council. Cuéllar was a Montgomery Summer Research Diversity Fellow at the ABF in 1992. After finishing his fellowship, Cuéllar completed a J.D. at Yale and Ph.D. from Stanford, before joining the Stanford law faculty.
At the same meetings a series of panels celebrated the scholarly accomplishments of ABF Research Professor John P. Heinz upon his taking emeritus status. Heinz, former Director of the ABF, is one of the world’s foremost experts on the legal profession. He and co-author Edward O. Laumann received the Kalven Prize in 1987 in recognition of their highly influential book, Chicago Lawyers. The panels took up major themes of Heinz’s research: lawyers and networks of power, status and inequality within the legal profession, markets and organizations in legal services, and the autonomy of lawyers. Selected papers will be published in a special issue of the ABF’s scholarly journal, Law & Social Inquiry.
The ABF’s Center on Law and Globalization (a joint effort with the University of Illinois College of Law) 
continues to see notable accomplishments and events. ABF Research Professor Terence Halliday and co-author Bruce Carruthers received three awards for their book Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis (Stanford 2009)—from three different sections of the American Sociological Association (Sociology of Law, Economic Sociology, and Global and Transnational Sociology). The Center organized two high level conferences: in March the Center held a conference in Washington, D.C. at the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund on “Measuring Law.” It brought together legal staff from international and financial institutions with academic specialists in measuring and appraising law. In May in Geneva, Switzerland, the Center convened a conference on public-private relationships in health, development, and trade. Center leaders Halliday and John Hagan each were awarded grants from the National Science Foundation on projects dealing respectively with criminal defense lawyers in China and regime-sponsored violence in pre- and post-invasion Iraq.
The ABF initiated a new program of research on access to justice to be headed by Senior Research Social Scientist Rebecca Sandefur, formerly of Stanford University. Sandefur and ABF colleagues Robert Nelson and Laura Beth Nielsen have met with the leadership of the Legal Services Corporation and state level court administrators to plan a series of possible projects. They convened a meeting of leading scholars in the field at the ABF in November and are moving ahead with efforts to map the supply of and demand for legal services across the nation.
ABF Research Professor Elizabeth Mertz organized a conference on “Legal Education Reform after Carnegie-Bringing Law-in-Action into the Law School Classroom,” co-sponsored by the ABF and held at the University of Wisconsin Law School in October. The conference brought together legal educators and social scientists who are introducing curricular innovations and attempting to measure their effectiveness in law school and beyond.
The Midyear Meetings of the American Bar Association held in February in Orlando, Florida, in February, showcased ABF scholars in the persons of Research Professor (on leave) Steven Levitt, who was the keynote speaker at the Fellows Awards Banquet, and Director Emeritus, Bryant Garth, who presented on his newly published book, Asian Legal Revivals (University of Chicago Press 2010, co-authored by Yves Dezalay), at the Fellows Research Seminar, chaired by former Fellows chair, James R. Silkenat.
In 2010 the ABF continued to expand its research program in diversity and law. Director Robert Nelson gave presentations from the After the JD project on the future of diversity in the legal profession to the Business Breakfast of the Fellows in San Francisco in August and before groups in Chicago, New York City, Columbia, Missouri, Washington, D.C., and Omaha. The ABF hosted four undergraduates in the Montgomery Summer Research Diversity Fellowship program and has 6 doctoral fellows in residence, four of whom are supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation in cooperation with the Law & Society Association for students conducting research on inequality and law. The Fellows have begun a new diversity initiative, which seeks to enhance outreach in Fellows recruitment.
In April ABF co-sponsored a major conference on human capability, held at the University of Chicago. “Creating Capabilities: Sources and Consequences for Law and Social Policy” was organized by ABF Research Professor and Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago James J. Heckman, and professors Martha C. Nussbaum of the University of Chicago and Robert A. Pollack of Washington University, St. Louis.
The ABF had a record breaking year for obtaining new external grants, bringing in over $857,000 in new grants. The ABF again proved successful in all grant submissions to the National Science Foundation. The last 15 ABF proposals to NSF have been funded, resulting in a success rate over the last 5 years of more than 90% compared to the current overall NSF funding rate of 23%.
ABF scholars continue to gain national and international recognition. In addition to the awards mentioned above, John Hagan was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, James Heckman was elected President of the Econometric Society (effective in 2013), Elizabeth Mertz was awarded a Fellowship in Princeton University’s Law and Public Affairs Program, and former Research Professor Austan Goolsbee was appointed Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.