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Legal Practice (legal + practice)
Selected AbstractsEven Lawyers Get the Blues: Gender, Depression, and Job Satisfaction in Legal PracticeLAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 1 2007John Hagan It is an intriguing puzzle that women lawyers, despite less desirable working conditions and blocked career advancement, report similar satisfaction as men lawyers with their legal careers. The paradoxical work satisfaction reported by women and men lawyers obscures a more notable difference in their depressed or despondent feelings. Using a panel study of women and men lawyers practicing in Toronto since the mid-1980s, we find at least three causal pathways through which gender indirectly is connected to job dissatisfaction and feelings of despondency. The first path is through gender differences in occupational power, which lead to differential despondency. The second path is through differences in perceived powerlessness, which directly influence job dissatisfaction. The third path is through feelings of despondency that result from concerns about the career consequences of having children. The combined picture that results illustrates the necessity to include measures of depressed affect in studies of dissatisfaction with legal practice. Explicit measurement and modeling of concerns about the consequences of having children and depressed feelings reveal a highly gendered response of women to legal practice that is otherwise much less apparent. Women are more likely to respond to their professional grievances with internalized feelings of despondency than with externalized expressions of job dissatisfaction. That is, they are more likely to privatize than publicize their professional troubles. [source] The Jurisprudence of Constitutional Conflict: Some Supplementations to Mattias KummEUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 2 2006Theodor Schilling This CBS is supposed to be part of neither the Community nor the municipal legal systems but to emerge from a legal practice comprising the whole of Community and municipal laws. Preliminarily Kumm claims, situating himself, for argument's sake, within the framework of analytical jurisprudence, that there is no legal reason for a court not to choose a different ultimate legal rule than the one it used to adhere to. These supplementations argue that Kumm's preliminary claim is erroneous. If accepted, this argument eliminates one of the reasons for the development of CBS. Concerning Kumm's main claim, these supplementations argue that the substantive content of CBS,its principles,may well be, and indeed largely already are, accommodated within the traditional structure of legal systems founded on ultimate legal rules, and that the structure proposed by Kumm would make impossible any distinction between general and legal discourses, thereby seriously undermining the determinacy of law. It also argues that Kumm's CBS can be reconstructed, within the analytical framework, only as outright supremacy of EC law. [source] Looking for Coherence within the European Community*EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 2 2005Stefano Bertea It focuses on a specific dimension of this relationship and shows how the appeals to coherence made by the European Court of Justice have shaped a particular branch of the European legal order, namely, the judicial review of Community acts. The analysis of the Court of Justice's case law in this field shows that in its extensive use of coherence the Court of Justice explored and brought into play different types of coherence and, while it failed to distinguish between them, it made use of sorts of coherence that thus far legal theorists have disregarded. The article concludes that a closer collaboration between legal theory and legal practice would be profitable for both legal theorists and Community law specialists. [source] Risk assessment and management: A community forensic mental health practice modelINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MENTAL HEALTH NURSING, Issue 4 2002Teresa Kelly ABSTRACT: In Victoria, the Crimes (Mental Impairment and Unfitness to be Tried) Act (1997) reformed legal practice in relation to the detention, management and release of persons found by a court to be not guilty on the grounds of insanity or unfit to be tried. This Act provides a legal structure for such ,forensic patients' to move from secure inpatient facilities into the community. This new legislative landscape has generated challenges for all stakeholders and has provided the impetus for the development of a risk assessment and management model. The key components of the model are the risk profile, assessment and management plan. The discussion comprises theory, legislation, practice implications and limitations of the model. Practice implications concern the provision of objective tools, which identify risk and document strategic interventions to support clinical management. Some of the practice limitations include the model's applicability to risk assessment and management and its dependence on a mercurial multi-service interface in after-hours crisis situations. In addition to this, the paper articulates human limitations implicit in the therapeutic relationship that necessarily underpins the model. The paper concludes with an exploration of the importance of evaluative processes as well as the need for formal support and education for clinicians. [source] The Law and Economics of Marriage ContractsJOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 2 2003Ian Smith Growth in property ownership has raised the stakes in the distribution of financial assets on divorce. Given high risks of marital failure, this has stimulated the demand for private ordering through enforceable marriage contracts. This paper surveys the existing law and economics literature and legal practice to consider the state of knowledge on the economic theory, scope and limits of written nuptial agreements. [source] Getting What We Asked For, Getting What We Paid For, and Not Liking What We Got: The Vanishing Civil TrialJOURNAL OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2004Stephen C. Yeazell The current rate of civil trials may result from two converging trends in civil practice: 20th-century procedural reforms and associated changes in the organization and financing of legal practice. The procedural reforms required greater pretrial investigation of facts, which in turn often required litigants to make regular investments of substantial capital, access to which was facilitated by changes in the organization of plaintiffs' practices. Together, these procedural reforms and changes in practice structure provide a plausible explanation for the observed phenomenon of declining rate and number of civil trials. [source] After Dark and Out in the Cold: Part-time Law Students and the Myth of ,Equivalency'JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 2 2009Andrew Francis This paper presents the findings of the first major research study of part-time law students. It argues that many face multiple disadvantages, largely unrecognized by universities, whose emphasis on the formal equivalency of part-time and full-time law degrees ignores the distinctive backgrounds and needs of part-time students. As a result, many are marginalized, impacting on their retention, overall performance, and work prospects. It is also argued that the context within which part-time law students experience legal education contributes to a collective habitus which may structure what is ,thinkable' for their futures. Such concerns are of particular importance given the strong vocational drive amongst part-time law students. An effective response requires action by both universities and the legal profession. Without this, part-time legal education will remain a fundamentally paradoxical experience, offering broader access to legal practice for non-traditional entrants, while continuing to inhibit their chances of success by entrenching their difference in the eyes of the profession. [source] Bushwhacking the Ethical High Road: Conflict of Interest in the Practice of Law and Real LifeLAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 1 2003Susan P. Shapiro A long-standing scholarly tradition regards professions, in general, and ethics rules, in particular, as "projects" of market control. It is no surprise, critics charge, that in the latest assault on the monopoly of the American legal profession,waged by multidisciplinary professional service firms,lawyers are hiding behind their ethics rules to protect their turf. In this article, I report on an extensive empirical study of conflict of interest in private legal practice and look comparatively at other fiduciaries, among them, accountants, psychotherapists, physicians, journalists, and academics. I investigate the role of ethics rules that seek to insure fiduciary loyalty in structuring the delivery of services. How does social and institutional change, roiling the fiduciary world, threaten disinterestedness and loyalty and how, if at all, do fiduciaries respond? How is the regulation of conflict of interest accomplished? Where are the conflicts rules most likely to be honored or ignored? What incentive structures encourage compliance? What are the costs and unexpected consequences of compliance? What is foregone? And is it all worth it? In what might come as a surprise to many, I find that the legal profession takes conflict of interest more seriously than many of the rest of us. As the title implies, legal practitioners largely travel alone, bushwhacking through the underbrush snarling the ethical high road. As critical scholarship predicted, lawyers do enjoy a monopoly at the end of the road. But this monopoly is achieved, not by restraint of trade or some other artifice or stratagem of market control, but by lack of competition. It seems that no one else is trudging alongside the lawyers. Lawyers are not necessarily more ethical than the others; they just behave more ethically,at least with respect to conflict of interest. The question is why. And what difference does it make? [source] Even Lawyers Get the Blues: Gender, Depression, and Job Satisfaction in Legal PracticeLAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 1 2007John Hagan It is an intriguing puzzle that women lawyers, despite less desirable working conditions and blocked career advancement, report similar satisfaction as men lawyers with their legal careers. The paradoxical work satisfaction reported by women and men lawyers obscures a more notable difference in their depressed or despondent feelings. Using a panel study of women and men lawyers practicing in Toronto since the mid-1980s, we find at least three causal pathways through which gender indirectly is connected to job dissatisfaction and feelings of despondency. The first path is through gender differences in occupational power, which lead to differential despondency. The second path is through differences in perceived powerlessness, which directly influence job dissatisfaction. The third path is through feelings of despondency that result from concerns about the career consequences of having children. The combined picture that results illustrates the necessity to include measures of depressed affect in studies of dissatisfaction with legal practice. Explicit measurement and modeling of concerns about the consequences of having children and depressed feelings reveal a highly gendered response of women to legal practice that is otherwise much less apparent. Women are more likely to respond to their professional grievances with internalized feelings of despondency than with externalized expressions of job dissatisfaction. That is, they are more likely to privatize than publicize their professional troubles. [source] The nature of law as an interpretive practice and its associated modes of inquiryLEGAL STUDIES, Issue 4 2009Nathan Gibbs The paper provides a critical survey of certain methodological debates in the field of legal philosophy in order to assess their implications for legal research in general. Underpinning this survey is a concern to establish the independence and integrity of both legal practice and legal research in the light of the risks posed by preponderant forms of instrumental rationality. Thus, Brian Leiter's recent call for a ,naturalised' jurisprudence is criticised for the instrumentalist basis upon which he claims to privilege forms of legal research apparently ,continuous with' the natural and empirical social sciences. As against Leiter, it is argued that there are in fact a range of distinct but interrelated modes of legal research. In this respect, the work of HLA Hart is interpreted as an example of a distinctively theoretical mode of inquiry into law. In addition, an account of the nature of a distinctively practical mode of legal inquiry is developed from a critique of Ronald Dworkin's excessively ,theoretical' reading of the interpretive character of legal practice. A constitutive practical feature of both modes of inquiry is their capacity to take up a certain distance from any exclusive concern with instrumental or pragmatic action. [source] The Relevance of Coercion: Some Preliminaries*RATIO JURIS, Issue 3 2009NICOS STAVROPOULOS Many philosophers take the view that, while coercion is a prominent and enduring feature of legal practice, its existence does not reflect a deep, constitutive property of law and therefore coercion plays at best a very limited role in the explanation of law's nature. This view has become more or less the orthodoxy in modern jurisprudence. I argue that an interesting and plausible possible role for coercion in the explanation of law is untouched by the arguments in support of the orthodox view. Since my main purpose is to clear the ground for the alternative, I spell out the orthodox view in some detail. I then briefly sketch the alternative. Finally, I turn to Jules Coleman's discussion of the alternative. [source] Judicial Review and Deliberative Democracy: A Circular Model of Law Creation and LegitimationRATIO JURIS, Issue 4 2001Mark Van Hoecke In this paper the author discusses the legitimation of judicial review of legislation. He argues that such a legitimation is not just a moral matter but is to be considered more generally in terms of societal acceptability, since it is based on a wide range of reasons including moral, social and pragmatic concerns. Moreover, the paper stresses that the legitimation of judicial decisions should be properly viewed in a circular perspective, so that the relationship between legislators and judges cannot be reduced to an absolute supremacy of those who are democratically elected over those who apply the law. On the contrary, the law is constantly made, adapted and developed in legal practice and legal decisions are basically legitimated through several processes of deliberative communication. [source] The Concept of Law Revised,Directives and Norms in the Perspectives of a New Legal RealismRATIO JURIS, Issue 1 2001Werner Krawietz Legal theory usually distinguishes only two kinds of legal realism: the American and the Scandinavian. Another school of this theoretical perspective is German legal realism, which refers to scholars like Ihering, Weber, and Schelsky. According to German legal realism, the author outlines what legal theory can do to persuade modern jurisprudence to face the social reality of law, conceived as institutionalized normative communication. The latter always occurs with reference to already valid and effectively operative legal norms which are used in an established, normatively binding legal practice in a given regional society. [source] Comparative Statutory Interpretation in the British IslesRATIO JURIS, Issue 4 2000Kay Goodall Existing studies of statutory interpretation are often of excellent quality but they have tended either to focus on legal practice to the detriment of comparative jurisprudence, or have examined legal reasoning at a level of abstraction which has made empirical study difficult. The author examines a recent development in this area and considers how it might be used to begin a project to identify any divergences in statutory interpretation among the various legal systems of the United Kingdom. [source] Articulating the Nexus of Politics and Law: War in Iraq and the Practice within Two Legal SystemsINTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2008Philip Liste Does law rule foreign affairs in the democratic state? Basically, one might expect that democratic executives operate on the ground of what is called the Rechtsstaat, and that in a political system with checks and balances operations,especially those eventually dropping out of that ground,are subject to judicial review. However, legal systems are more often than not willing to abstain from a legal governance of its countries' foreign policy,because of "political reasons." Moreover, democracies obviously vary according to their legal operations. At least in the area of foreign affairs, the relationship of democracy and law does not take up a necessary character. Facing this contingency, the article engages in the discursive construction of a politics and law nexus in the course of the operations of two legal systems, in the United States and Germany. For that reason, it will proceed by deconstructing two legal decisions related to the war in Iraq. Building upon the premise that legal practices are intertwined into a larger web of (legal) text, the article argues that the possibility of a judicial abstention in cases bearing reference to foreign policy issues depends on meaning produced in the course of the signification and positioning of discursive elements like "politics" and "law." Thus, speaking law is a politico-legal practice. [source] Regulating Law Firm Ethics Management: An Empirical Assessment of an Innovation in Regulation of the Legal Profession in New South WalesJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2010Christine Parker The Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) was the first jurisdiction to fully deregulate law firm structure and allow alternative business structures in the legal profession. At the same time it also introduced an innovation in regulation of the legal profession, requiring that incorporated legal practices implement ,appropriate management systems' for ensuring the provision of legal services in compliance with professional ethical obligations. This paper presents a preliminary empirical evaluation of the impact of this attempt at ,management-based regulation'. We find that the NSW requirement that firms self-assess their ethics management leads to a large and statistically significant drop in complaints. The (self-assessed) level of implementation of ethics management infrastructure, however, does not make any difference. The relevance of these findings to debates about deprofessionalization, managerialism, and commercialism in the legal profession is discussed, and the NSW approach is distinguished from the more heavy-handed English legal aid approach to regulating law firm quality management. [source] The Embedded Nature of Rural Legal Services: Sustaining Service Provision in WalesJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 2 2007Alex Franklin There is a considerable amount of literature on embeddedness as part of sociological theory of economic action. Cultural and structural embeddedness often work together to shape the framework of economic relations, but, in an analysis of rural solicitors, we find unevenness between cultural and structural embeddedness. There are strong traits of the former, through a sense of place and belonging, but much less evidence of the latter with the structural relationships appearing relatively weak and underdeveloped. In a discussion supported by empirical data from a recent survey of rural legal practices in Wales, a number of causes are identified. The paper concludes that trends towards increasingly specialized rather than generalized legal service provision, set alongside the increasingly differentiated nature of rural space, suggest that the longer-term sustainability of rural legal practices may require both greater investment at the level of structural embeddedness alongside continuing reinvestment at the cultural level. [source] Making the Case for Laws That Improve Health: A Framework for Public Health Law ResearchTHE MILBANK QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2010SCOTT BURRIS Context: Public health law has received considerable attention in recent years and has become an essential field in public health. Public health law research, however, has received less attention. Methods: Expert commentary. Findings: This article explores public health law research, defined as the scientific study of the relation of law and legal practices to population health. The article offers a logic model of public health law research and a typology of approaches to studying the effects of law on public health. Research on the content and prevalence of public health laws, processes of adopting and implementing laws, and the extent to which and mechanisms through which law affects health outcomes can use methods drawn from epidemiology, economics, sociology, and other disciplines. The maturation of public health law research as a field depends on methodological rigor, adequate research funding, access to appropriate data sources, and policymakers' use of research findings. Conclusions: Public health law research is a young field but holds great promise for supporting evidence-based policymaking that will improve population health. [source] | |||||||||||||