1 See Goode, William J., Community Within a Community: The Professions, 22 Am. Soc. Rev. 194 (1957).Google Scholar

2 See Ladinsky, Jack & Grossman, Joel B., Organizational Consequences of Professional Consensus: Lawyers and the Selection of Judges, 11 Ad. Sci. Q. 79 (1966);Bucher, Rue & Strauss, Anselm, Professions in Process, 66 Am. J. Soc. 325 (1961);Wilensky, Harold L., The Professionalization of Everyone? 70 Am. J. Soc. 137 (1964); Richard H. Hall, Occupations and the Social Structure (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969).Google Scholar

3 See Bucher, Rue, Pathology: A Study of Social Movements Within a Profession, 10 Soc. Problems 40 (1962); Everett C. Hughes, Men and Their Work (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958); id., The Professions in Society, 26 Canadian J. Econ. & Pol. Sci. 54 (1960); Howard S. Becker et al., Boys in White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Smith, Harvey L., Contingencies of Professional Differentiation, 63 Am. J. Soc. 410 (1958).Google Scholar

4 Bucher & Strauss, supra note 2.Google Scholar

5 Carlin, Jerome E., Lawyers on Their Own: A Study of Individual Practitioners in Chicago (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962); id., Lawyers' Ethics: A Survey of the New York City Bar (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1966); Ladinsky, Jack, Careers of Lawyers, Law Practice, and Legal Institutions, 28 Am. Soc. Rev. 47 (1963).Google Scholar

6 Heinz, John P. et al., 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, 718.Google Scholar

7 Id.; Laumann, Edward O. & Heinz, John P., Specialization and Prestige in the Legal Profession: The Structure of Deference, 1977 A.B.F. Res. J. 155; id., The Organization of Lawyers' Work: Size, Intensity, and Co-Practice in the Fields of Law, 1979 A.B.F. Res. J. 217; Slovak, Jeffrey S., Giving and Getting Respect: Prestige and Stratification in a Legal Elite, 1980 A.B.F. Res. J. 31.Google Scholar

8 Carlin, Lawyers on Their Own, supra note 5.Google Scholar

9 Hall, supra note 2.Google Scholar

10 Goode, supra note 1.Google Scholar

11 For exceptions to this trend see Joel F. Handler, The Lawyer and His Community: The Practicing Bar in a Middle-sized City (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), and Donald D. Landon, The Legal Profession and the Local Community: A Comparative Study of Community Context and the Delivery of Legal Services (Jefferson City: Missouri Bar Foundation, 1977).Google Scholar

12 Cf. Handler, supra note 11.Google Scholar

13 Cf. Handler and Landon, supra note 11.Google Scholar

14 Cf. Richard S. Wells, Lawyers and the Allocation of Justice, in James R. Klonoski & Robert I. Mendelsohn, eds., The Politics of Local Justice 149 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970).Google Scholar

15 ABA Code of Professional Responsibility Canon 5 (1978) states: “A Lawyer should exercise independent judgment on behalf of a client.” EC 5–1 further states: “The professional judgment of the lawyer should be exercised, within the bounds of the law, solely for the benefit of his client and free of compromising influences and loyalties.” While no specific mention is made in the Code of community influences on the lawyer's independent judgment, EC 5–21 states: “The obligation of a lawyer to exercise professional judgment solely on behalf of his client requires that he disregard the desires of others that might impair his free judgment.” Reference is made to “economic, political, or social pressures upon the lawyer” which are described as “subtle” and to which the “lawyer must be alert.” The intimate context of small town life would appear to make the professional ideal of independence more difficult to achieve than in more anonymous urban settings. See Pirsig, Maynard E., Cases and Materials on Professional Responsibility 401 (2d ed. St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co., 1970).Google Scholar

16 Carlin, Lawyers on Their Own, supra note 5, at 184.Google Scholar

17 Hughes, The Professions in Society, supra note 3, at 60–61.Google Scholar

18 Cf. Daniel H. Pollitt, Counsel for the Unpopular Cause: The “Hazard of Being Undone,” 43 N.C.L. Rev. (1964). Wells, supra note 14.Google Scholar

19 Cf. Richard H. Hall, Professionalization and Bureaucratization, 33 Am. Soc. Rev. 92 (1968).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 The Springfield population was derived from a combination of lists provided by the Greene County Bar Association, the Missouri Bar, and the telephone directory. Each of the 200 lawyers in private practice was mailed a survey form. The response rate was precisely 50 percent. An examination of the known characteristics of those lawyers who did not respond indicated that the respondents were representative of the bar in terms of proportion of firm partners, associates, and solo practitioners. The rural sample was drawn from a list of attorneys supplied by the Missouri Bar and compared with the Legal Directories Publishing Company's 1976-77 Missouri Directory. A 20 percent random sample was drawn from attorneys practicing in counties ranging from 40,000 population to the least populous county in the state. Again, a mail survey was used, and we achieved a 51 percent return rate. The highest return rate was from the smallest counties, but in absolute numbers lawyers in counties with populations between 20,000 and 30,000 constituted almost 40 percent of the returns and were thus somewhat overrepresented. The rural sample cannot be assumed to be fully representative of the rural lawyer population. However, all categories of rural counties were represented in the returns.Google Scholar

21 The Springfield respondents were 78 percent Protestant and 7 percent Catholic in a community that is 72 percent Protestant and 6 percent Catholic. The rural respondents were largely (72 percent) Protestant, reflecting the rural religious orientation in Missouri. The majority of both sets of respondents were inclined to identify themselves as Republicans, again reflecting the dominant political orientation of each area.Google Scholar

22 A linear relationship exists between county size and proportion of solo practitioners in MissouriGoogle Scholar

23 Cf. Thomas R. Bell, Law Practice in a Small Town (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University Law School, 1969).Google Scholar

24 Arnold, Thurman, The Symbols of Government (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962). See especially pp. 152–54.Google Scholar

25 Cf. Thomas R. Ford, ed., Rural U.S.A.: Persistence and Change (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1978). See especially ch. 6, Values and Beliefs of Rural People.Google Scholar

26 Cf. David M. Engel & Eric H. Steele, Civil Cases and Society: Process and Order in the Civil Justice System, 1979 A.B.F. Res. J. 295.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Of course the opposite may also be true. There may be a sufficiently strong congruence between the moral perspective of the community and that of the attorney that he unconsciously implements community perspectives in his work. As Pollitt, supra note 18, has observed, the lawyer may well operate as a “captive of the community's values.” Rather than responding to pressure, the attorney may be implementing deeply internalized preferences.Google Scholar

28 Krislov, Samuel, Law, in Howard M. Vollmer & Donald L. Mills, eds., Professionalization (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966). See especially pp. 218–26.Google Scholar

29 Bell, supra note 23, at 73.Google Scholar

30 Dye, Thomas R., The Local-Cosmopolitan Dimension and the Study of Urban Politics, 41 Soc. Forces 239 (1963). The local-cosmopolitan dimension refers to the scale of social environment in which the individual sees himself. “Local” and “cosmopolitan” are concepts used to differentiate between persons with contrasting involvement and identification with local or national social structures. “Locals” are typically parochial, confined in interest to their own community, and preoccupied with local concerns. “Cosmopolitans” are typically persons who identify with issues, events, and organizations that are translocal. By Dye's criteria, a score of 20 or above on the scale reflects extreme local orientation and a score of 5, extreme cosmopolitan orientation. Since localistic attitudes are typically inversely related to status, we assumed that lawyers, like other professionals, would tend toward the “cosmopolitan” end of the scale. Dye discovered that in suburban communities with socioeconomic characteristics similar to Springfield, the mean score for residents was 16.3. Dye did not measure the orientation of professional people independently, but presumably the professional subgroup in that sample would score somewhat below 16.3.Google Scholar

31 F. Stuart Chapin, Experimental Designs in Sociological Research 275–78 app. B (rev. ed. New York: Harper & Bros., 1955).Google Scholar

32 Obviously, the data here are not conclusive. We would need data indicating how other professional groups score on the Dye scale before we could safely conclude that there is a built-in local orientation in the bar as our preliminary data suggest.Google Scholar

33 Chapin, supra note 31, at 275–78 app. B. The scale “is a Guttman-type scale with reproducibility coefficients of .92 to .97 for groups of leaders.” The scale contains five components: membership, attendance, financial contributions, member of committees, offices held. Each dimension of participation is weighted as follows: membership = 1 to office holder =5.Google Scholar

34 It should be noted that the median income figures for the rural and urban group are affected by the relatively high incidence of new young firm associates being hired in the urban setting at salaries often under $10,000 (1976). Nearly all the 21 lawyers from the urban setting with incomes under $15,000 were young firm associates. Because this type of firm practice is less typical of rural settings, there are fewer low-salaried associates. Also, both urban and rural groups show income to be significantly related to number of years in practice. The rural bar is a significantly “older” bar. Twenty-two percent had been in practice 25 years or more compared with 13 percent in the urban sample. Each bar had a considerable proportion of young lawyers, however: 44.6 percent had been in practice less than 10 years in the rural sample compared with 56 percent in the urban sample.Google Scholar

35 As opposed to metropolitan firm specialists, who typically serve highly specialized interests and thus a restricted clientele.Google Scholar

36 Cf. Carlin, Lawyers' Ethics, supra note 5, at 165–82.Google Scholar

37 Note 15 supra.Google Scholar

38 Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Lawyers and Their Society: A Comparative Study of the Legal Profession in Germany and in the United States 92–93 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Wilensky, supra note 2.Google Scholar

40 The scale measured participation in ABA, the Missouri Bar, county bar associations, and “other” in four types of activity: membership = 1; section membership =2; committee responsibility = 3; office = 4. The highest level of participation in each association was summed together to establish a score that could range from 1 to 16. We arbitrarily set 0–3 as low, 4–7 as moderate, and 8 or above as high.Google Scholar

41 Cf. Bell, supra note 23, at 96–98.Google Scholar

42 Cf. Charles A. Reich, The New Property, 73 Yale L.J. 733–87 (1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 Cf. Bell, supra note 23, at 21, 46.Google Scholar

44 Additional data suggest that contrary to the metropolitan bar, which is rigidly stratified by income, practice type, clientele, and professional prestige, the rural bar shows little evidence of such stratification. Cf. Handler, supra note 11.Google Scholar