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What Lawyers Do: Understanding the Many American Legal Practices

1st Edition
Catherine L. Fisk | Ann Southworth
ISBN: 9781642426113
Subject: Professional Identity Formation
Format: Print - Softbound
Page Count: 642
Copyright: 2020 | Status: In Stock
Other Formats Available

This book explores the structure and regulation of the contemporary American legal profession. It introduces students to the rich empirical literature on the profession, teaching them about the profession’s overall composition and organization as well as huge variation in the practice settings, types of work, and daily experiences of American lawyers and their clients. It describes powerful economic and cultural forces that are reshaping the legal profession, and it presents the most recent scholarship and commentary on new challenges for the legal profession posed by technology, litigation finance, globalization, access to justice, diversity, and changes to legal education. Suitable for seminars or courses on professional identity and the sociology of the legal profession, the book invites students to reflect on their place in the profession and how they will navigate the turbulent landscape to chart successful, rewarding and responsible careers in almost any type of practice today’s law graduates might enter. This book presents materials and questions drawn from recent events highlighting professional ethics issues currently in the news, but it could supplement rather than replace materials on the law of professional responsibility.

The book provides sufficient explanation of basic legal concepts and the operation of the legal system to make it suitable for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses, as well as first-year law students, but it also works very well for second and third year courses.


Imprint: West Academic Publishing
Series: American Casebook Series
Publication Date: 10/23/2019
Related Subject(s): Professional Resp/Ethics

Catherine L. Fisk, University of CA-Berkeley School of Law

Ann Southworth, University of CA-Irvine School of Law

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