1 E.g., Ladinsky, Jack, Careers of Lawyers, Law Practice, and Legal Institutions, Am. Soc. Rev. 28 47 (1963); id., The Impact of Social Backgrounds of Lawyers on Law Practice and the Law, 16 J. Legal Educ. 127 (1963); id., The Social Profile of a Metropolitan Bar: A Statistical Survey in Detroit, Mich. St. B.J., Feb. 1964, at 12; Jerome E. Carlin, Lawyers' Ethics: A Survey of the New York City Bar (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1966); Joel F. Handler, Ellen Jane Hollingsworth, & Howard S. Erlanger, Lawyers and the Pursuit of Legal Rights (New York: Academic Press, 1978).Google Scholar

2 E.g., on large law firms, Erwin O. Smigel, The Wall Street Lawyer: Professional Organization Man? (New York: Free Press, 1964); on divorce courts, H. J. O'Corman, Lawyers and Matrimonial Cases: A Study of Informal Pressures in Private Professional Practice (New York: Free Press, 1963); on solo practice, Jerome E. Carlin, Lawyers on Their Own: A Study of Individual Practitioners in Chicago (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962).Google Scholar

3 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951); Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (1968 enlarged ed.; New York: Free Press, 1968).Google Scholar

4 See James W. Hurst, The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1950); Magali S. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).Google Scholar

5 Cf. Edwin M. Lemert, Human Deviance, Social Problems, and Social Control (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967); John Lofland, Deviance and Identity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969).Google Scholar

6 Measurement of the varying amounts of effort directed to the different fields of law should contribute to the comparative study of professional communities. By comparing distributions of legal effort at two points in time, for example, one could identify the points of stability and change in the pattern of legal concern. Similarly, one could compare professional communities, say, the bars of Chicago, Boston, and Houston, to gain some insight into the bases of the differences among professional communities.Google Scholar

7 Michael T. Hannan & John Freeman, The Population Ecology of Organizations, 82 Am. J. Soc. 929 (1977).Google Scholar

8 John P. Heinz, Edward O. Laumann, Charles L. Cappell, Terence C. Halliday, & Michael H. Schaalman, Diversity, Representation, and Leadership in an Urban Bar: A First Report on a Survey of the Chicago Bar, 1976 A.B.F. Res. J. 717.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 The sample was drawn by scientific sampling procedures so that the estimates of population characteristics would have known levels of sampling accuracy, free of systematic distortion or bias. The population universe was defined to include all lawyers who had office addresses within the city limits of Chicago, as listed in either Sullivan's Law Directory for the State of Illinois, 1974–75 or Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory, 1974. We used two directories to increase the coverage and to avoid biases of an individual directory. (These procedures would not, however, eliminate biases that the directories may share.) Our 777 completed interviews represent 82.1 percent of our original target sample. Only 8.4 percent explicitly refused to grant us an interview; the remaining 9.5 percent were missed due to the subject's illness, time constraints, scheduling problems, and the like. An examination of the known characteristics of those lawyers whom we failed to include, for whatever reasons, suggests that we slightly underenumerated nonmembers of the Chicago Bar Association and lawyers engaged in solo practice, especially those who maintain only accommodation addresses in the city. This underenumeration, however, is sufficiently small that we can, for most purposes, treat the completed sample as representative of the defined population universe.Google Scholar

10 See Richard Zehnle, Specialization in the Legal Profession: An Analysis of Current Proposals (Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1975).Google Scholar

11 See ABA Code of Professional Responsibility, DR 2–105(A)(I) (1975). “Limitation of Practic.”Google Scholar

12 Supra note 2.Google Scholar

13 We used relatively fine-grained categories with the intention of combining them if our sample proved to contain insufficient numbers of respondents in any specialty to permit separate analysis of it. Some of the fields, although expected to have few practitioners, were included because they are traditionally recognized as distinct specialties (e.g., admiralty) and others because we were particularly interested in one or more of their characteristics (e.g., condemnations, where a successful practice is reputed to depend heavily on good political connections).Google Scholar

14 There are a number of ways one might have framed this question, each with some important advantages and disadvantages. After some pilot work, we chose to ask the question in terms of the past year because we found that a shorter time period (e.g., the past week or month) tended to elicit a misleading degree of concentration of effort. A single matter—for example, trying a major case or negotiating a merger—might well consume the lawyer's time for a week or even a month. From the perspective of a year, however, the practitioner was often seen to have handled a variety of different cases in several fields of law. Thus, we were willing to sacrifice the accuracy of recall of recent events for a somewhat less reliable but substantively more significant characterization of a practitioner's work life. Instead of asking for an estimate of the percentage of total time devoted to each field, we might have asked our respondents to estimate the number of days worked on each field over the past year. But this would not have solved the problem of comparability of the units-work days are not of standard length, nor of uniform efficiency or quality. Using hours might have been a better alternative. The units would, at least, have been of standard length. But over a span of a year recollections of numbers of hours devoted to particular subject matter would necessarily become rough estimates, and thus be little, if any, more informative than the percentages that we used. Asking for actual hours might also have increased considerably the burden of this question on our respondents and on the scarce interview time available. Lawyers bill for their time in hourly units, and most of them thus keep records of how they spend their hours. If we had asked for hours, there would probably have been a strong tendency for our respondents to reach for their records or to say that they could not answer the question without consulting records. Moreover, simple aggregation of the categories employed in the records probably would not have sufficed to answer the question—the billing records show the work by client, of course, not by field, and one client may well require work in different fields. It seemed to us that all of this would consume more time than it was worth. We had a number of other questions that we also wanted to ask.Google Scholar

15 Several other such sources of ambiguity exist. The most important one, undoubtedly, is the “civil litigation” category, which may include litigation in any of the fields other than criminal. This problem is compounded by the fact that “litigation time” may well include not only the actual time in court but also the time spent preparing for trial or attempting to negotiate a settlement. It seemed advisable to include litigation as a separate field, however, because many large firms have separate litigation departments and many lawyers think of themselves as “litigators” of a variety of types of cases. Since we asked a number of other questions concerning the respondent's activities, we are in a position to make somewhat finer distinctions within certain selected fields of law. We have distinguished between those attorneys who handle corporate tax matters and those who handle personal tax matters, between those who handle corporate real estate transactions and those who primarily handle residential real estate matters, and between litigators who represent corporations and those who litigate private claims against corporations, governmental units, or other individuals. For those practitioners who reported doing any tax, real estate, or litigation work, we determined whether they received 80 percent or more of their professional income from corporate clients. Persons receiving the bulk of their income from such clients were designated as being active in corporate tax, corporate real estate, or corporate litigation. All others were assigned to the “general” tax, real estate, or litigation categories.Google Scholar

16 John P. Heinz & Edward O. Laumann, The Legal Profession: Client Interests, Professional Roles, and Social Hierarchies, 76 Mich. L. Rev. 1111 (1978). ^aThe number of practitioners is defined as all the persons who report spending at least 5 percent of their work time in the field. ^bSee text and note 13 supra for explanation.Google Scholar

17 Charles L. Cappell, Organization and Specialization of Legal Activity (unpublished paper, American Bar Foundation, Feb. 13, 1979).Google Scholar

18 B. Peter Pashigian, The Number and Earnings of Lawyers, 1978 A.B.F. Res. J. 51, 77–81 tables 10 & 11. It may be that, if the effort of persons other than lawyers were considered, the share of total effort devoted to the legal work of corporations would be seen to exceed that devoted to individuals and small businesses. The large law firms that serve corporate clients have very sizable staffs of supporting personnel, often far larger numbers than the number of lawyers in the firms. (Five years ago, the ratio of staff to lawyers in the big firms often approached two to one. With the growth in the use of memory typewriters and word-processing equipment, staff efficiency has increased greatly; a more usual ratio now appears to be about one and one-half to one.) These support personnel include paralegals of various sorts, highly trained secretaries who are skilled in the use of legal forms and the preparation of documents, librarians, private investigators, computer technicians, file clerks, expert consultants in several fields, and so on. The solo practitioners who serve many individual clients may, by contrast, get by with one part-time secretary. (Two or more lawyers, not necessarily joined in a formal partnership, often share a single suite and a single secretary. Some lawyers even hire offices and secretaries only by the hour.) The total manpower purchased by corporate clients might, therefore, be thought to outweigh that allocated to individuals. But Pashigian's evidence is that, at least as measured by compensation in the marketplace, any additional effort devoted to corporate clients is either only a minor increment or not very highly valued. And if we look only at the allocation of the effort of the members of the profession with which we are concerned—lawyers—our analysis suggests that the totals devoted to the two broad classes of clients are roughly equal.Google Scholar

19 See fig. 1 infra at 236.Google Scholar

20 The measure of “exclusive attention” used here is that the respondents counted as full-time specialists in a Field must have checked the “more than 50 percent” time category for that field and must have checked no additional field. Under this criterion, a respondent might have devoted up to 5 percent of his time to each of a number of other fields. This measure is probably the best approximation possible, given the categories available in our data.Google Scholar

21 It may surprise some lawyers to find that criminal prosecution is not always a full-time job. But only 9 of our 18 respondents who reported devoting some time to criminal prosecution did not also report at least 5 percent of their time being devoted to some other category of work. There are several explanations for the time allocation patterns of the other 9. Two of them were employed by federal agencies other than the U.S. attorney and did some enforcement work that they coded as criminal prosecution as well as doing various sorts of administrative law work and civil litigation. One was a supervisory official in the office of the state's attorney and was responsible for overseeing some criminal prosecution as well as civil litigation. One was an assistant state's attorney who did some consumer fraud work that he reported in the “consumer law” category, and another was an assistant state's attorney who had started that job within the past year so that a portion of the time reporting period covered his previous work as a solo practitioner. Another respondent had moved in the other direction during the reporting period—from a position as a prosecutor to private practice in a firm. Three assistant state's attorneys were “moonlighting,” doing small amounts of divorce, real estate, and “general family” practice on the side for private clients.Google Scholar

22 See Hannan & Freeman, supra note 7, esp. at 939–56.Google Scholar

23 Cf. Rosemary Stevens, American Medicine and the Public Interest (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

24 In fact, two matrices were constructed according to two different criteria. The first included lawyers who spent as little as 5 percent of their time in each field, and the second required that the lawyers spend at least 25 percent of their time in the field in order to be included. Since the results for the second matrix were essentially identical to those of the first, the results reported here are based on the “5 percent plus” matrix because it has substantially larger numbers in each field and thus is more statistically reliable.Google Scholar

25 See Peter M. Blau, Inequality and Heterogeneity: A Primitive Theory of Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1977).Google Scholar

26 In fact, our sample includes 259 practitioners in the “general corporate” field at the “5 percent plus” level of activity and 133 at the “25 percent plus” level, but only 6 and 1 in admiralty at the 5 and 25 percent levels, respectively.Google Scholar

27 An alternative to this procedure would be to calculate Yule's Q. a nonparametric, symmetric measure of the degree of association, for each of the original fourfold tables. Hubert M. Blalock, Social Statistics (2d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972); Leo A. Goodman & William H. Kruskal, Measures of Association for Cross Classifications, 49 J. Am. Statistical A. 732 (1954). We have done so for both the “5 percent plus” matrix and the “25 percent plus” matrix with results quite comparable to those reported here.Google Scholar

28 See Stephen C. Johnson, Hierarchical Clustering Schemes, 32 Psychometrika 241 (1967); Kenneth D. Bailey, Cluster Analysis, in David R. Heise, ed., Sociological Methodology: 1975, Jossey-Bass Behavior Science Series, at 59 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974); Ronald S. Burt, Power in a Social Topology, in Roland J. Liebert & Allen W. Imershein, eds., Power, Paradigms, and Community Research (London: Sage Publications, for the International Sociological Association, 1977).Google Scholar

29 When very high average conditional probabilities occur between fields, one would want to know the asymmetric conditional probabilities because one would expect that the field with fewer practitioners is a more specialized subfield of the larger field.Google Scholar

30 Allowing for some discrepancies of detail, we find that there is a remarkable degree of correspondence between the clusters identified on the basis of co-practice and the clusters based on the correlations among judgments of the prestige of the various fields. See Edward O. Laumann & John P. Heinz, Specialization and Prestige in the Legal Profession: The Structure of Deference, 1977 A.B.F. Res. J. 155, 198.Google Scholar

31 For a detailed characterization of the clientele of 25 fields of law, see John P. Heinz & Edward O. Laumann, Social Differentiation of the Chicago Bar (unpublished paper presented at the 1978 Annual Meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, New Orleans). The substance of this paper is summarized, without the full set of tables, in Heinz & Laumann, supra note 16.Google Scholar

32 See Laumann & Heinz, supra note 30, at 166–67 table 1Google Scholar

33 See Eliot Freidson, Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge 203–331 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1970); see also id., Professional Dominance: The Social Structure of Medical Care 6 (New York: Atherton Press, 1970); Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Social Pathology (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959); and Kingsley Davis, Mental Hygiene and the Class Structure, 1 Psychiatry 55 (1938).Google Scholar

34 Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Doctors and Lawyers: A Comment on the Theory of the Professions, 1 Canadian Rev. Soc. & Anthropology 17, 19 (1964).Google Scholar

35 The adversary nature of the litigation process, as well as the clients' differing social types, make that conflict inevitable—e.g., labor unions versus management, criminal defendants versus prosecutors, taxpayers versus tax consumers.Google Scholar

36 The fact that both the doctrines and the lawyers' practices tend to be bounded by clients' social types is surely not coincidental but a result of interrelated, mutually dependent processes. That is, the doctrinal limits may be defined in part by client type (perhaps through client influence on the curricula of law schools), and the boundaries between doctrines may in turn define the literatures that a given practitioner will read, the literatures in which he will attempt to “keep up with developments.” The kinds of clients, and thus of cases, that a scholar has in mind will influence the content of a book or a course on “civil procedure.”Google Scholar

37 Compare, for example, the doctrines regarding criminal intent as applied in United States v. Balint, 258 U.S. 250 (1922), and United States v. Behrman, 258 U.S. 280 (1922), to sellers of narcotics and in United States v. Freed, 401 U.S. 601 (1971), to possessors of hand grenades with those applied to corporations and corporate executives as defendants in an antitrust prosecution in United States v. U.S. Gypsum Co., 98 S. Ct. 2864 (1978). Leon Green wrote often on the limits of doctrine and on the extent to which the content of doctrine is determined by the contexts of the cases. In Judge and Jury (Kansas City: Vernon Law Book Co., 1930), Green observed (at 2–3): The intellectual machinery employed in handling tort cases has not been, nor doubtless can it be, scientifically laid out. It has grown up, as our language has grown, word by word, phrase by phrase, to fit a particular case, as well as a particular taste, each word and each phrase becoming a starting point for numberless shadings and combinations with other words and phrases as a wide range of judicial taste should dictate. Given the peculiar sanctity accorded terms judicially spoken, the language of the law becomes imposed upon terms of general usage in such a way that only the most skilled and wary, if any, can escape its entrapments. The problem of language is the severest test that legal science faces. The judgments which men pass in courts and elsewhere are generally far beyond any power they have for expressing them nicely and acceptably. No structural classificatory terms for tort cases have yet been widely accepted. The judges, practitioners, and scholars have been too busy handling the cases which pressed for immediate disposition and explanation to take time for structural work. Thus, classificatory structure has been largely ignored. After setting forth his own classification scheme, Green then argues (at 16): The foregoing classification is structural. It barely suggests the wealth of theories, doctrines, formulas, and rules which are employed by the judicial process in the various types of cases. Nor can it be said that these instrumentalities for detail can be delineated with anything suggesting precision…. The most significant observation which can be made about them is that each type of case may have its own peculiar network of theories, doctrines, formulas, and rules. And (at 19–20): Behind theories, doctrines, formulas and rules are the factors which control judgment. They lie outside of the theories, formulas and rules employed by courts in articulating judgment, and show dimly, if at all, through them. These factors can probably never be satisfactorily formulated…. Doubtless judgment is sometimes affected by the selection of the means of articulation, because the factors which control judgment are clouded by such means. In such instances, the integrity of the particular theory, doctrine, formula or rule may seem to be impaired, with the result that doubt is frequently thrown upon the validity of the decision itself. But in most instances, probably the employment of a particular theory, doctrine, formula, or rule as against another is of small significance. The selection of the means of articulation is believed to be largely a matter of taste and finesse. And the debates about the rightness and wrongness of this theory or that, the application of this rule or that, are more frequently wasted energies than of vital importance. See also Leon Green, The Study and Teaching of Tort Law, 34 Texas L. Rev. I, 18 (1955); id., Tort Law Public Law in Disguise (pt. II), 38 Texas L. Rev. 257, 266 (1960); id., Protection of Trade Relations under Tort Law, 47 Va. L. Rev. 559, 560 (1961).Google Scholar

38 Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Robert E. Keeton & Jeffrey O'Connell, Basic Protection for the Traffic Victim: A Blueprint for Reforming Automobile Insurance (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1965).Google Scholar

40 Maitland's famous metaphor, commenting on history rather than law, was first published in his Prologue to a History of English Law, 14 L.Q. Rev. 13 (1898). It is also found in the first sentence of the second and subsequent editions of 1 Frederick Pollock & Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law 1 (2d ed.; reissue, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

41 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Society, ed. Guenther Roth & Claus Wittick, at 775–76 et seq. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).Google Scholar

42 Tables 1 and 3 list the fields of law that are included in these broader “sectors.” The figures presented in the text here, however, were derived by a separate analysis rather than from the analyses presented in those tables.Google Scholar

43 Durkheim, among others, has noted that specialization creates interdependence among the specialized parts and thus a pressure toward coordinating or integrating the parts so that they are in some sort of adjustment. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson, 62, 200, 301–2, 353, 364, 406 passim (New York: Free Press, 1964). But the simultaneous existence of substantial numbers of both specialists and generalists may lead to conflict. Inherent antagonisms arise between the interests of specialists and the interests of part-timers or dilettantes. Because the specialists are wholly devoted to a narrowly circumscribed field of activity, their standing among their peers rests on their unremitting service to their chosen field. They tend to be acutely aware of the variable levels of competence, performance, and knowledgeability of practitioners, and they have a strong interest in raising standards of performance by eliminating the “unqualified” who grab the occasional case and bungle it, thus threatening the reputation of the field. The part-timer, by contrast, has an interest in maintaining ease of entry into a field of practice; he will thus oppose formal certification procedures and other barriers to entry, such as specialized referral schemes. The specialist's interest in standardizing entry and practitioner performance will be viewed by the part-timer (and perhaps others) as a tactic for securing a monopoly position; see generally, Jerold S. Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Freidson, Profession of Medicine, supra note 33; id., Professional Dominance, supra note 33; Larson, supra note 4. The history of the emergence of medical specialty boards is replete with examples of these confrontations between specialists and generalists (see Glenn Greenwood & Robert F. Frederickson, Specialization in the Medical and Legal Professions 15–24 (Chicago: Callaghan & Co., 1964); Stevens, supra note 23), and history appears to be repeating itself in the more recent controversies in the legal profession over specialty certification (see Barlow F. Christensen, Specialization (Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1967); Zehnle, supra note 10; Jerome A. Hochberg, The Drive to Specialization, in Ralph Nader & Mark Green, eds., Verdicts on Lawyers 118 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1977)). Our results suggest that the balance of power among lawyers on the issue of specialization is now heavily weighted in favor of the generalists in most fields of practice, but the increasingly successful prosecution of malpractice suits against lawyers could, of course, produce growing pressures toward certification of specialties. (Insurance companies already require specialty certification as a prerequisite to the issuance of certain kinds of medical malpractice policies.) Note, however, that such pressure for change would not be endogenously generated but rather would be a lagged response to extra-professional demands for accountability.Google Scholar

44 Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance 147–63 (New York: Free Press, 1973).Google Scholar

45 Carlin, supra note 2, at 175–84.Google Scholar

46 This conclusion is consistent with that reached, from entirely different data, in Heinz & Laumann, supra note 16.Google Scholar