All scholarly literatures, even the most well meaning, tend unfortunately toward insularity and self-regard. The tendency reflects less on the character of individual scholars than on the institutional arrangements that surround the production of scholarship. These create incentives for all of us to keep on writing to each other (and nobody else) about what we have already been writing about (with small variations, of course). What shakes a literature out of its complacency is new work that innovates while meeting the old on its own ground. Corey Shdaimah's study of legal services lawyers and their clients provides just this sort of refreshing contribution. It is incisive, empirically grounded, rigorous, and sensitive to its subjects without being sentimental about them.

Shdaimah frames her study as one of “progressive lawyering.” By this she means models of legal practice that are “compatible with social justice goals” and at the same time recognize “the tensions between” goals such as empowering the poor and effecting systemic social change “and the hierarchical, disempowering aspects of lawyering and the legal process” (21). To a literature preoccupied with theory and scholarly self-reflection, Shdaimah offers an empirical study of “situated practice” (xiii) that informs a normative prescription for a “feminist ethic of risk” (165) to guide progressive lawyering practice.

Through interviews with legal services lawyers and their clients from a civil legal aid office in a northeastern U.S. city, she explores some of the tensions inherent in progressive lawyering. The lawyers she studies work with clients who face many, often compounding problems and may struggle with physical or mental disabilities. While clients share the condition of poverty, in other respects they are as heterogeneous as any other group of people: some are delightful; some are not particularly nice; some make what their lawyers see as good choices about how to handle their money or their children; others have tendencies to make what their lawyers consider bad choices. In this context, lawyers who themselves have varying temperaments, working styles, and motivations for doing this type of law try to balance a variety of imperatives. Most centrally, they try to balance respect for and encouragement of clients' autonomy with their assessments of clients' capacity to take actions and make decisions on their own behalf. Lawyers struggle with how to collaborate with clients in identifying and pursuing the goals of their representation. They struggle with where to set the boundaries of their relationships with clients. They struggle with how to understand the local impacts of their work in the context of broader social justice goals. Shdaimah shows how these struggles happen within and through lawyers' relationships with their clients.

Shdaimah advocates a feminist ethic of risk with three components. She sees her lawyers and clients enacting this ethic together, at least some of the time. “Responsible actions” are taken when people act with acknowledgment of what can practically be accomplished “while continuing to imagine something different” (167). To conform to the feminist ethic, responsible actions must be “grounded in community”: they must be informed by exchanges between lawyers and clients that create “understanding of [each other's] situations, abilities, and limitations” and reflect “respect for each other's decisions” (169). Finally, a feminist ethic of risk involves “strategic risk taking” that “challeng[es] authority when it is possible to do so and with full knowledge of the risks involved and awareness of who will bear the burden of failure” (170). As Shdaimah observes, personal relationships are central to this ethic. She argues that scholarship removed to the realm of abstraction misses out on both the empirical realities and the transformative possibilities of progressive lawyers' practice.

There are other things to like about this book as well. It will be of interest to scholars of the professions, as it nicely illuminates challenges faced by all kinds of professionals who provide direct services to personal clients—for example, doctors, therapists, social workers, teachers, and dentists, as well as some types of lawyers. Among these are tensions between professional expertise and client autonomy, tensions surrounding the boundaries of client-professional relationships and personal intimacy and empathy, and tensions between what professional ethics and knowledge may prescribe and what clients' and professionals' capacities may permit. To sociolegal scholars, it will be of interest as a new piece in the growing mosaic of contemporary studies of how legal institutions work in practice. To analysts of poverty, the book provides a valuable portrait of how civil law fits in to the maintenance and, occasionally, the amelioration of inequality. The methodological appendix is a good example of how to do such writing well.