The Supreme Court's decision in City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power v. Manhart has engendered a considerable debate, much of which has appeared in the pages of this Journal. Defenders of the Manhart decision take its critics to task for failure to appreciate the place of that decision in the overall jurisprudence of employment discrimination. In this article, the authors challenge the underlying conception of the law of sex discrimination that is said to dictate the result in Manhart. Far from erecting a per se rule against all sex classifications, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is shown to recognize both the relevance of prevalent social norms about sex differences and the legitimacy of certain interests of employers as limited justifications for the maintenance of sex-conscious lines in some circumstances, a recognition that contrasts sharply with the statute's categorical prohibition on racial classifications. It follows from this discussion that Manhart's outcome was not ordained by the ethos of the laws against sex discrimination.

This article describes and evaluates a computer program for drafting the security agreements and related documents required by Article 9 of the Uni- form Commercial Code to create and perfect security interests in consumer goods and equipment. The authors suggest that such computer applications have great promise and invite further such research.

This study considers the relationships between first-year law students' admission credentials, the amount of time they spend in study, and the grades they receive on examination. Findings include that there is a significant drop in effort during the first year, that while effort invested in study pays off in improved grades this effort is much less significant in explaining grades than is student ability as measured by LSAT and undergraduate grades, that students in the middle and bottom of the class are helped more by substantial study than are those in the top, that class attendance is much more valuable in raising grades than is equivalent time in other study, and that none of the various study techniques examined could be linked with major differences in results.

In an earlier article (1979 American Bar Foundation Research Journal 1), James A. Sprowl described a new computational processor that enabled attorneys to automate repetitive client-interviewing and document-drafting tasks. In this article, Sprowl and coauthor Ronald W. Staudt describe the first experimental use of the new processor to serve the clients of a law school clinic. In the experiment attorneys and secretaries were trained to design automated practice systems. The authors analyze the results of this experiment and draw some preliminary conclusions about the future usefulness of automated law practice systems.

The American Bar Association is considering a revision of its Code of Professional Responsibility. One revision deals specifically with lawyers whose clients are organizations; it attempts to delineate the ethical responsibilities of such lawyers when they discover an employee or a member of one of their clients is engaged in wrongdoing on the organization's behalf. Because the proposal suggests that corporate counsel may be justified in public disclosure of the wrongdoing when the organization itself fails to rectify the problem, it has sparked much controversy in the profession and much speculation as to whether and when corporate counsel will “blow the whistle.” The article offers a sociological perspective on the act of a corporate counsel's public disclosure of organizational wrongdoing. The act of disclosure is treated as a social behavior, the likelihood of which is increased or decreased by a number of factors including the attorney's awareness of the wrongdoing, the attorney's orientations to the larger profession, the structure of the professional practice setting within which the counsel is located, and the supports for disclosure offered by the legal profession through its formal organizations. These factors are described and then combined into a general predictive model of disclosure by corporate counsel. A concluding discussion of the general ramifications of the proposed revisions focuses on the social implications of the attorney-client privilege, in which the client is as unique an actor as is the large organization.

This article summarizes the results of a study of 291 reported cases brought against media for libel during a four-year period. The results confirmed the finding in an earlier study that only 5 percent of plaintiffs emerged from the appellate process with judgments compared with more than 60 percent of defendants. Most of the defense successes occurred without trial. In cases that did reach trial, plaintiffs were successful far more often before juries than before judges but lost more than half these judgments on appeal. Cases were analyzed in terms of the identity of the parties, the content of the charges, and the role of state and federal law in shaping the outcome. Despite the recent attention to federal constitutional protections, it is clear that media defendants still do, and must, rely heavily on state law defenses. Finally, the Hutchinson and Wolston rulings of 1979 produced little change in appellate decisions.