ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 12 No. 4 (April 2002) pp. 183-184.

LEGAL PROFESSIONS: WORK, STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATION by Jerry Van Hoy (Editor). New York: JAI-Elsevier Science, 2001. 273pp. Cloth $82.00. ISBN: 0-7623-0800-1.

Reviewed by Herbert Kritzer, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

This volume of articles focuses on a range of topics concerning legal professions in North America and Europe. Rather than being developed along a clear set of themes, it is akin to the variety of articles one might expect of find in a journal devoted to the legal profession (e.g., the INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION). As such, it is not possible to assess the success or failure of the editor in bringing together a set of articles that informs the reader on a particular issue concerning legal professions. (Although each touches on the legal profession in some way, in my reading, at least two of the chapters in the volume are only tangentially involved in issues in the study of the legal profession.) Nonetheless, for someone immersed in the literature on the legal profession, there are a variety of interesting nuggets to be found, and for the reader looking for some insight into the questions currently motivating research on the legal profession,
this volume presents a useful introduction to many of the major issues.

Individual chapters in the volume examine:

--Changing patterns of access to various legal positions in the United States;

--Impact of government induced changes in the market of solicitors' services in England;

--The growth, or lack thereof, of the globalized law firm in England and Germany;

--The discontents of legal practice, and departures from the profession;

--The dilemmas of those wanting to work part-time as legal professionals;

--Differing conceptions of time among the actors involved in asbestos litigation;

--The impact of tort reform and other market changes on plaintiffs' lawyers;

--A typology of alternative approaches to cause lawyering;

--The changing nature of legal practice in 19th century Boston;

--The evaluation of judges in Illinois by the legal practitioners who appear before them.

Most of the articles rely upon structured survey data and/or semi-structured interviews. Some of the quantitative articles employ multivariate methods such as path analysis or log-linear analysis, while others rely largely on simple tabulations.

The editor has grouped the articles in the volume into three sections:


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--Changes in the structure of the legal profession;

--Legal culture, professional time, and job satisfaction;

--Lawyers and their work.

There are at best very loose connections among the articles in the three sections. For example, in the second section, there are two articles ostensibly dealing with "time"; however, each of the articles used the idea of time in such a different way that there really is no connection. I actually found the strongest connection between two articles in two different sections. One of those articles, by Gerard Hanlon, examines how government action in England and Wales over the last 20 years or so has radically influenced the market for legal services. In essence Hanlon shows the dependence of the English professions on actions of the state, directly in
funding legal services and affecting the profession's monopolies, and indirectly by encouraging rapid growth in the corporate services sector. The second article, by Stephen Daniels and Joanne Martin, examines, in part, how tort reform has impacted the practice of plaintiffs' lawyers in Texas. Together, these two articles show how dependent legal professions are on decisions by governmental actors. Although legal professions are tied closely to the market, the structure of that market is controlled in significant part by the state.

In summary, this is a useful collection of essays. None of the pieces is earth shattering but there are interesting insights to be gleaned. The inclusion of research on legal professions in four different countries (five, if one cares to treat Texas as a world unto itself) is a real plus as is the variety of data collection methods and analytic approaches applied by the contributors.

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Copyright 2002 by the author, Herbert Kritzer