While the legal profession's efforts to suppress the practice of law by non-lawyers go back to colonial times, the modern unauthorized practice movement began in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Its greatest success, however, took place during the 40 years from 1920 to 1960. Recent years have seen the reversal of some of the prior successes in the field, and current challenges to unauthorized practice restrictions raise serious questions about their present validity. Do the benefits to the public from the enforcement of rules against the unauthorized practice of law justify continuation of the effort?

This is the first in a series of articles that will report the results of a pilot effort to assess how well the system of civil discovery is working and to identify the principal problems which burden that system. The study revolves around interviews with 180 Chicago area litigators. This first essay, which synthesizes observations, insights, and complaints by interviewed attorneys, suggests that the world of civil discovery is not one monolithic whole, but consists of subworlds which exhibit clearly distinguishable features and problems. In addition to describing the principal problems which afflict the discovery system in its two major subworlds, the author reports what the interviewed lawyers suggest are the primary causes of those problems. While the litigators identify many ways in which the character of lawyering encumbers and disrupts the discovery process, they also locate much of the blame for the system's problems in the behavior of judges and the inefficiency of the judicial machinery. The interviews produced a dramatically widespread appeal to the courts to increase use of sanctions as a means of restraining discovery abuse.

Lawyers have become concerned about the rising numbers and the rising amounts of professional liability claims, which have in turn driven up liability insurance premiums and temporarily even caused an alarming contraction in the supply of insurance coverage. This article examines the state of factual information that could be used to measure and explain the development. It goes on to discuss the potential role that increased knowledge of the types and causes of professional liability claims could play in efforts to reverse the development, followed by a discussion of the difficulties of obtaining usable data from the two principal potential sources—lawyers and their insurers. The second half of the article describes and evaluates the work of the American Bar Association's Special Committee on Lawyers' Professional Liability in developing, in cooperation with the major insurers, a comprehensive data collection and reporting system for lawyers' professional liability claims.

During the 1970s, the Florida legislature enacted some of the nation's most innovative and comprehensive state and local land-planning and regulatory programs. The Environmental Land and Water Management Act of 1972 adopted large parts of an early draft of article 7 of the ALI Model Land Development Code, thereby asserting a state regulatory role in areas of critical state concern and for developments of regional impact; Florida's Local Government Comprehensive Planning Act of 1975 introduced planning and regulatory innovations that, if ever fully implemented, could place Florida in the vanguard of land regulatory reform at the local governmental level. This study, which is the concluding part of a study of the evolution of federal, state, and local regulatory roles in the management of coastal land resources, examines the intergovernmental, interagency, and separate-branch tensions that have emerged as Florida moves to implement its new laws. Included, inter alia, is an analysis of the Florida Supreme Court's controversial nondelegation decision in Askew v. Cross Key Waterways. Although Florida can claim some limited successes in program implementation, its land management systems are still not adequately integrated and coordinated, and they have not been implemented as successfully as their proponents thought possible. For example, the state has several alternatives for complying with the federal requirements for an approved management program under the Federal Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972—the comprehensive land management system examined in this study being only one of the available ones. Yet Florida still has been unable to obtain federal approval, and, if it ever does, will be one of the last of the major coastal states to do so. Much of Florida's difficulty in forging a well-integrated coastal land management process is attributable to substantial disagreements on two basic propositions: because of Florida's unique ecological characteristics, coastal land management should not be divorced from comprehensive land management for other purposes; and because of substantial regional diversities within the state, coastal land management in Florida should include a significant planning and regulatory role for local governments as well as for regional and state agencies.