Elite attorneys have been the objects of social scientific study and speculation for many years. This article contributes to that body of thought by reporting some of the results of a research project that studied 59 members of Chicago's corporate actor legal elite-the lawyers who serve the city's major business, social, civic, political, and cultural organizations.

The article briefly defines the elite studied and the design of the overall re-search project. It then focuses on the working situations of these lawyers and the professional roles they play for their respective corporate actors. A division of legal labor that is discovered to separate house counsel from law firm partners among the elite is analyzed in some depth.

Since the professional roles of these elite attorneys differ from those de-scribed by other social scientists earlier, the article concludes by offering a theory to explain this apparent social change. By tapping recent discussions of the coming of postliberal society, it suggests that corporate actors engineer this new division of legal labor for their attorneys in response to the complex new legal problems posed by institutional changes in the larger society.

There have been few successful attempts in the history of the organized bar since 1870 to establish alternative bar groups that challenge the dominance of the large comprehensive local and state bar associations over the representation of lawyers' interests. Founded in 1969, a product of the social ferment of the 1960s, the Chicago Council of Lawyers provides an example of one such attempt. This paper examines the conditions under which a reform-oriented counter-bar association is likely to arise, the factors that permitted its successful establishment in Chicago, and the functions it serves within the legal profession as an alternative to the Chicago Bar Association.

While the violence surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago may have sparked the formation of an alternative bar association, it was intraprofessional matters that deeply concerned the founders of the Council particularly the performance of the organized bar in providing legal services to the poor and in improving the quality of the judiciary. Within the legal profession itself there was also a striking disjunction between the age of the leadership of the bar and of the numerous young lawyers who flooded in-to the bar in the 1960s. Preexisting networks of young activist lawyers greatly facilitated organizational formation.

As a reformist group with a small and relatively homogeneous membership, and lacking strong ties to powerful institutions, the Council can afford to take strong stances on controversial issues. By aggressively supporting positions at odds with those of the more established bar associations, and thus providing the media, the public, and legislators with an alternative viewpoint, the Council contributes to shattering the myth of a unified profession and to the demystification of professional authority.

Litigation concerning conditions in institutions such as prisons or mental hospitals does not stop at the issuance of a remedial decree. Steps must be taken to assure implementation. Increasingly, the courts are resorting to special masters to assist them in implementing such institutional reform. While the use of masters by courts is a firmly established tradition, the role assigned to masters in the institutional context is often an extraordinarily broad and intrusive one. As a result, serious questions have arisen about this new extra-traditional master role and about the applicability, the sufficiency, of the traditional rationales and restraints. This article is among the first in a small but developing body of literature that begins to examine the new master role and the questions concerning it.

The human subjects protection committee is the principal legal mechanism for protecting the rights and welfare of human subjects of biomedical and behavioral research. In this article the author explores the influence of variations in the structure of the review process and in the composition and operating procedures of the committees on committee performance. He also assesses revisions in the review process proposed by the National Commission on the Protection of Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research.