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In the last quarter of the twentieth century, urban law practice changed markedly. Using data from two surveys of Chicago lawyers, the first in 1975 and the second in 1995, the article argues that the most consequential development was the sheer increase in the size of firms.

This book chapter by Susan P. Shapiro examines white-collar crime and the ways in which it differs from other types of criminal behavior.

This article with Nour J. Abdul-Razzak studies the consequences of lifting restrictions on funding of groups engaging in outside spending in elections.

Susan P. Shapiro explores conflict of interest in legal practice, focusing on the challenges and ethical implications of navigating conflicts in legal settings.

This book, featuring Carol A. Heimer, explores how responsibility is organized in hospital and home settings to benefit critically ill newborns.

This book explores the role of private interests in the making of national policy, revealing how they influence and manipulate public decision-making.

Susan P. Shapiro analyzes how newspaper fact-checkers exercise their craft and how stories change in this article.

This pathbreaking book not only reveals how “wayward capitalists”—representatives of publicly held corporations, stock buyers and sellers, stockbrokers, investment advisers, accountants, and attorneys—defraud investors but also explains how Securities and Exchange Commission enforcers catch, investigate, and prosecute these offenders.

This volume, published jointly with the ABF, offers a uniquely sophisticated and comprehensive analysis of lawyers’ professional lives.

  • Books

Chicago Lawyers: The Social Structure of the Bar

John P. Heinz and Edward O. Laumann
Learning and Practicing Law

Published by Russell Sage Foundation

What determines the systematic allocation of status, power, and economic reward among lawyers?  What kind of social structure organizes lawyers’ roles in the bar and in the larger community?

As Heinz and Laumann convincingly demonstrate, the legal profession is stratified primarily by the character of the clients served, not by the type of legal service rendered.  In fact, the distinction between corporate and individual clients divides the bar into two remarkably separate hemispheres.  Using data from extensive personal interviews with nearly 800 Chicago lawyers, the authors show that lawyers who serve one type of client seldom serve the other.  Furthermore, lawyers’ political, ethno-religious, and social ties are very likely to correspond to those of their client types.  Greater deference is consistently shown to corporate lawyers, who seem to acquire power by association with their powerful clients.

Heinz and Laumann also discover that these two “hemispheres” of the legal profession are not effectively integrated by intraprofessional organizations such as the bar, courts, or law schools.  The fact that the bar is structured primarily along extraprofessional lines raises intriguing questions about the law and the nature of professionalism, questions addressed in a provocative and far-ranging final chapter.

This volume, published jointly with the American Bar Foundation, offers a uniquely sophisticated and comprehensive analysis of lawyers’ professional lives.  It will be of exceptional importance to sociologists and others interested in the legal profession, in the general study of professions, and in social stratification and the distribution of power.