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American Legal Profession Book Review

Decent Essays

In the reading, “The Transformation of the American Legal Profession,” Abel Richard explores how the stratification of the legal profession has changed throughout the years. Richard shares that during the 1870s and 1950s American Lawyers “developed local, state, and national bar association; promulgated ethical codes, and established disciplinary procedures” (Richard). In other words, they started to restrict the requirements to become a lawyer in order to protect the “legal knowledge.” Richard also addresses the issue of competition within the lawyers. He claims that due to the high competition, solo practice started to decline and many lawyers started to work in larger firms. Similar to this reading, in “Chicago Lawyers: The Social Structure of The Bar,” the authors John Heinz and Edward Laumann focus on the contemporary …show more content…

Students have better chances of finding job opportunities if they go to a prestige law school. As mention before, lawyers prefer to work for corporations and large firms because of the financial benefits and the control over their autonomy. Even those who wanted to pursue public interest for personal values ended up switching to corporate law because they saw a greatly disadvantaged working in the public interest field (Stover). This explains the decline in solo practice because lawyers discovered they are unable to exercise their altruistic motives since their job limits what they can do. Lawyers who want to make a change by working for the poor realized that in order to exercise their political influence they would have to do it through litigation (Seron). However, as Stover mentions in his article, there are “limited sources. [and that] severely [limits] the ability of legal aid attorneys to adequately represent clients.” In other words, there is not much they can do to make a

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