The following two themes emerge in an investigation of legal culture in the United States: (1) a denigration of rights and yet (2) a persistent notion that rights are important and should be salvaged. The discourse of rights continues to act as an important frame of reference throughout legal culture. The open-ended nature of rights discourse plus the powerful cultural resonance of rights encourage the use of rights talk to frame issues even when the framers are severely critical of the use of rights. Even if many people agree, however, there are reasons to assess this consensus negatively.

The venerable legal profession has emerged, over the past generation, as one of the nation's fastest growing occupations. In this paper, we suggest that this fact is not mere happenstance, but is part and parcel of other fundamental changes in the “legal services industry.” We attempt to define and clarify these changes by presenting time series data on a number of these developments, including the growth of law as an economic sector, the increasing concentration of law firm activity, and income trends among lawyers. We then offer a simplified demand and supply analysis of the market for lawyers, concluding that several interrelated factors fostered the lawyer boom. In the paper's final sections, we speculate about the forces causing a spiraling demand for legal services and a growing inequality of incomes between the elite firms and sole practitioners.

This essay examines the ways in which women lawyers of two generation–the pioneer generation of the 1880s and the “new woman” generation of the 1910s–confronted the dilemma of marriage and career. Members of the Equity Club in the 1880s revealed three distinct sets of attitudes toward balancing marriage and career: the separatist approach that a professional woman must remain single; the Victorian attitude that a married woman must sacrifice her career; and the integrated approach that a woman could have both marriage and career. Women lawyers surveyed by the Bureau of Vocational Information in 1920 revealed that the “new woman” generation of women lawyers lived in an era of transition. While they shared the same separatist, Victorian, and integrated views toward marriage and law practice as did women lawyers in the 1880s, they also embraced the new values of the early 20th century which shaped both the contours of the legal profession and the parameters of women's lives. Set within the context of the new values of the era, the separatist, Victorian, and integrated approaches to resolving the dilemma of marriage and career, which were originally formulated by women lawyers in the late 19th century, assumed new meanings for women lawyers in the early 20th century.

This study of graduates of the University of Michigan Law School from the late 1970s reports on the differing ways that women and men have responded to the conflicting claims of work and family. It finds that women with children who have entered the profession have indeed continued to bear the principal responsibilities for the care of children, but it also finds that these women, with all their burdens, are more satisfied with their careers and with the balance of their family and professional lives than other women and than men.

Based on extensive archival research, this article offers a political account of the six-year process in which the ABA developed its latest ethics code for lawyers, the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. The article casts doubt on the validity of several functionalist and critical theories about the provenance and significance of professional ethics codes generally and the ABA's codes in particular. It evaluates the Model Rules process as an instance of de facto law making by a private group. And it identifies a lawyer's “professionalism-in-fact”—a set of common themes in the way lawyers currently think about the field of legal ethics. At the same time, however, the article stresses the ethical pluralism and structural differentiation of today's legal profession and roots the ethical preoccupations of various types of lawyers in the circumstances of their particular practices.

Past studies have generally found that perceptions of the likelihood of formal and informal sanctions have lower explanatory power of noncompliance with laws than do internalized norms. Using data from two telephone surveys, we examined a situational characteristic, structural opportunity, that may prod individuals to think about the likelihood of detection from the Internal Revenue Service for underreporting income. Structural opportunity is the degree to which an individual's economic or social situation provides ways to avoid detection. Individuals with high structural opportunity perceived a lower likelihood of IRS detection and indicated that they were less likely to feel guilty if they engaged in tax cheating. Our data also suggested that some individuals with high structural opportunity may be in social networks which condone tax cheating. As expected, structural opportunity provided a condition under which individuals took into consideration the perceived likelihood of formal and informal detection in formulating intentions to engage in tax cheating. Our findings suggest that an examination of the interaction between situational and individual characteristics will provide a more complete understanding of decisions to engage in illegal behavior. Implications for deterrence theory are discussed.

This essay suggests that recent work in feminist theory should reorient the questions that are asked about the role of gender in the legal profession. Some use gender as a category of analysis to explore differences that reinforce conventional gendered stereotypes, such as the conceptualization of work and family in lawyering as a “women's issue.” Others use conventional sociology of the professions analysis, such as stratification, to measure women's “success” and “satisfaction” in the context of the traditional law firm. By focusing on some recent historical and sociological research on women in the legal and medical professions, the author illustrates how we might ask different questions, not to reify gender differences but to more fully examine the role that gender difference, as socially constructed, might play in the transformation of law practice.

The antitrust laws demand competition but, in general, no competitive outcome is possible in markets characterized by substantial fixed costs. Consequently, restrictions on competition may have an efficiency defense, and a prohibition of cartel agreements may entail costs as well as benefits. Giving examples, this essay illustrates the problem that fixed costs pose for competition, long recognized in economics, and discusses implications for real-world industries. The author addresses Wiley's recent criticism of theoretical and empirical work on the fixed cost problem and outlines an agenda for legal research that can help illuminate the underlying economic and antitrust policy issues posed by industries with high fixed costs.