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The Constituencies of Elite Urban Lawyers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

John P. Heinz ,
Edward O. Laumann ,
Robert L. Nelson  and
Paul S. Schnorr
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Abstract

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This study analyzes Chicago lawyers' networks of relationships with a selected set of prominent practitioners, drawing on 1994–95 interviews with 788 randomly selected respondents. Since the same technique was used 20 years earlier, the research sheds light on the extent to which the constituencies of elite Chicago lawyers have changed. The network is organized in three principal sectors—liberals, trial lawyers, and corporate lawyers. The structure implies a lack of integration within the bar. Minorities and women are now more widely dispersed across the segments of the network than they were in 1975, but they still have relatively few connections in the corporate sector of the bar.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , 1997 , pp. 441 - 472
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

Support for this work was provided by grants from the American Bar Endowment, Northwestern University's Institute for Policy Research, the National Science Foundation (#SBR-9411515), and the Chicago Bar Foundation. The article is based on a report presented at the Law and Society Association Annual Meetings, Glasgow, Scotland, July 1996. The authors acknowledge, with gratitude, the contributions to this work of Brian Gran, Kathleen Hull, Rebecca Sandefur, and Stephanie Walke.

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