ABF.

Research Advancing Justice

Home > Archives for Books

Resource Types: Books

Tom Ginsburg considers the establishment and development of judicial review through constitutional courts in new democracies across the globe.

This book, with Terence Halliday, shows how global actors developed comprehensive norms for corporate bankruptcy laws and how national policymakers responded in turn.

This volume, with Tom Ginsburg, explores the factors behind constitutional durability and explains how countries design systems that withstand the test of time.

Arguing with Tradition by Justin Richland is the first book to explore language and interaction within a contemporary Native American legal system.

This book explores how students learn how to “think like a lawyer”, and the language and culture of law schools that shape their education.

Laura Beth Nielsen examines how law and hierarchy contribute to offensive pubic speech, offering, in essence, a ‘license to harass’ in public spaces.

In this book, Susan Shapiro reports on the complex ethical dilemmas and conflicts of interest faced by lawyers in the U.S. Drawing on case studies and interviews with legal professionals, she examines the challenges of navigating conflicts of interest, balancing loyalty to clients with duties to the court and the public, and addressing issues of bias and discrimination.

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.

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.