Monthly Archives: October 2009
Oct 27, 2009 Tanina Rostain and John Flood
An invitation from the Legal Profession Section Editors
John Flood and Tanina Rostain
As legal profession scholars have observed, law practice is being reinvented at an ever-accelerating speed the world over. Legal services are being routinized, commoditized, outsourced, disaggregated, reassembled, computerized, and unbundled—among associates, law firm partners, solo practitioners, contract lawyers, paralegals, law consultants, temporary law workers, websites, and online shared platforms. In the corporate realm, multinational companies demand that their lawyers be available to provide services 24/7 in every corner of the globe. In the meantime, lawyers representing individuals, non-profits, and NGOs increasingly use new technologies and transnational resources and strategies to develop more effective and efficient models of service delivery. Despite this rapid pace of change, many lawyer regulatory regimes lag behind and continue to hew to a model of regulation tied to geographical jurisdiction and domestic legal norms.
In recent years, the field of the legal profession has benefitted from a proliferation of research by scholars seeking to understand the many changing dimensions of the legal profession. Researchers have drawn on a broad range of social science disciplines, methodological approaches, and multilingual proficiencies to investigate legal practice(s) in a wide variety of geographic settings.
We highlight three aspects of the legal profession that have received attention. First, there has been work on the composition and geographical dispersion of law firms. Examples of the former include, in the US, Marc Galanter and Bill Henderson’s revision of tournament theory as the “elastic tournament”, which can be contrasted with David Wilkins and Mitu Gulati’s reconception of law firm internal labor markets. The geography of the legal profession, both in terms of globalization and styles of professionalism has been a growing field led by Jonathon Beaverstock, Daniel Muzio, Peter Taylor and James Faulconbridge in the UK.
Second, there is a growing body of literature on what lawyers actually do and the ways in which legal services are delivered. Robert Rosen has argued that “we’re all consultants now” as clients motivate lawyers to alter their organizational strategies. Sigrid Quack in Germany has researched on transnational law-making by lawyers. John Flood and Fabian Sosa unpicked the role international lawyers play in transnational business transactions showing their activities were very much a function of the type of law firm with which they associated. Tanina Rostain examined the role of the tax bar in the market for abusive tax shelters and its subtle interpretation of professionalism and gatekeeping. At the other end of the spectrum Sida Liu has described the coping strategies of criminal defense lawyers in China in the face of powerful state opposition, something alien to lawyers in the West.
Third, the field of regulation of lawyers has moved beyond the analysis of lawyers’ ethics traditionally found in the legal journals, i.e. the individual lawyer’s behavior. In countries such as Australia law firms have the power now to incorporate and list themselves on the stock exchange. In the UK in 2011 non-lawyers (e.g. supermarkets; insurance companies) will be able to own law firms. This raises questions over law firms’ ethical responsibility in the face of commercial pressures that appear to conflict with the norms of professionalism as Christine Parker has studied in Australia. Andrew Boon has even asked if we are seeing the globalization of legal ethics. And Laurel Terry has shown how the legal profession is being impacted by the regulatory might of the WTO and GATS. Lawyers and the legal profession are no longer immune from the forces of modernization and globalization.
Given this wealth, this space offers an opportunity to initiate an ongoing discussion about the most interesting work and make it available to a wider audience of legal scholars. With these ends in mind, we have recruited leading scholars from around the world to showcase their favorite exemplars of recent research on lawyers, the legal profession, and lawyer regulation. Contributing editors have been invited to use this platform to highlight the most significant developments in the field and provide access — for researchers mainly working inside the Anglo-American legal tradition — to important work not readily available in English. Our hope is that this section will contribute to the growing global conversations about lawyers’ ideals and lawyers’ practices.
Oct 26, 2009 Michael Froomkin
Legal Profession Section Editors
The Section Editors choose the Contributing Editors and exercise editorial control over their section. In addition, each Section Editor will write at least one contribution (”jot”) per year. Questions about contributing to a section ought usually to be addressed to the section editors.
Professor John Flood
University of Westminster School of Law
Professor Tanina Rostain
Co-Director, Center for Professional Values & Practice
Co-Chair, New York Law and Society Colloquium
New York Law School
Contributing Editors
Contributing Editors agree to write at least one jot for Jotwell each year.
Professor Andy Boon
Dean, University of Westminster School of Law
Professor Elizabeth Chambliss
Co-Director, Center for Professional Values & Practice
New York Law School
Dr. Kay-Wah Chan
Macquarie University, Department of Business Law
Professor Susan Saab Fortney
Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Law
Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development
Texas Tech University School of Law
Professor Jay Krishnan
Charles L. Whistler Faculty Fellow
Director, India Initiative, Center on the Global Legal Profession
Indiana University Maurer School of Law
Professor Sida Liu
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Professor Richard Moorhead
Cardiff Law School
Professor Christine Parker
Associate Professor & Reader in the Law Faculty
University of Melbourne
Richard Parnham
Legal Journalist
Professor Carole Silver
Visiting Professor of Law
Executive Director, Center for the Study of the Legal Profession
Georgetown University Law Center
Professor Laurel S. Terry
Harvey A. Feldman Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law
Penn State Dickinson School of Law
Oct 25, 2009 Michael Froomkin
Jotwell: The Journal of Things We Like (Lots) seeks short reviews of (very) recent scholarship related to the law that the reviewer likes and thinks deserves a wide audience. The ideal Jotwell review will not merely celebrate scholarly achievement, but situate it in the context of other scholarship in a manner that explains to both specialists and non-specialists why the work is important.
Although critique is welcome, reviewers should choose the subjects they write about with an eye toward identifying and celebrating work that makes an original contribution, and that will be of interest to others. First-time contributors may wish to consult the Jotwell Mission Statement for more information about what Jotwell seeks, and what it seeks to achieve.
Reviews need not be written in a particularly formal manner. Contributors should feel free to write in a manner that will be understandable to scholars, practitioners, and even non-lawyers.
Ordinarily, a Jotwell contribution will
- be between 500-1000 words;
- focus on one work, ideally a recent article, but a discussion of a recent book is also welcome;
- begin with a hyperlink to the original work — in order to make the conversation as inclusive as possible, there is a strong preference for reviews to focus on scholarly works that can be found online without using a subscription service such as Westlaw or Lexis. That said, reviews of articles that are not freely available online, and also of very recent books, are also welcome.
Initially, Jotwell particularly seeks contributions relating to:
We intend to add more sections in the coming months.
References
Authors are responsible for the content and cite-checking of their own articles. Jotwell editors and staff may make editorial suggestions, and may alter the formatting to conform to the house style, but the author remains the final authority on content appearing under his or her name.
- Please keep citations to a minimum.
- Please include a hyperlink, if possible, to any works referenced.
- Textual citations are preferred. Endnotes, with hyperlinks, are allowed if your HTML skills extend that far.
- Authors are welcome to follow The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (18th ed. 2005), or the The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (2d Ed.) or indeed to adopt any other citation form which makes it easy to find the work cited.
Technical
Jotwell publishes in HTML, which is a very simple text format and which does not lend itself to footnotes; textual citations are much preferred.
Contributors should email their article, in plain text, in HTML, or in a common wordprocessor format (Open Office, WordPerfect, or Word) to ed.jotwell@gmail.com and we will forward the article to the appropriate Section Editors. Or you may, if you prefer, contact the appropriate Section Editors directly.
Oct 19, 2009 Michael Froomkin
The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)–JOTWELL–invites you to join us in filling a telling gap in legal scholarship by creating a space where legal academics will go to identify, celebrate, and discuss the best new legal scholarship. Currently there are about 350 law reviews in North America, not to mention relevant journals in related disciplines, foreign publications, and new online pre-print services such as SSRN and BePress. Never in legal publishing have so many written so much, and never has it been harder to figure out what to read, both inside and especially outside one’s own specialization. Perhaps if legal academics were more given to writing (and valuing) review essays, this problem would be less serious. But that is not, in the main, our style.
We in the legal academy value originality. We celebrate the new. And, whether we admit it or not, we also value incisiveness. An essay deconstructing, distinguishing, or even dismembering another’s theory is much more likely to be published, not to mention valued, than one which focuses mainly on praising the work of others. Books may be reviewed, but articles are responded to; and any writer of a response understands that his job is to do more than simply agree.
Most of us are able to keep abreast of our fields, but it is increasingly hard to know what we should be reading in related areas. It is nearly impossible to situate oneself in other fields that may be of interest but cannot be the major focus of our attention.
A small number of major law journals once served as the gatekeepers of legitimacy and, in so doing, signaled what was important. To be published in Harvard or Yale or other comparable journals was to enjoy an imprimatur that commanded attention; to read, or at least scan, those journals was due diligence that one was keeping up with developments in legal thinking and theory. The elite journals still have importance – something in Harvard is likely to get it and its author noticed. However, a focus on those few most-cited journals alone was never enough, and it certainly is not adequate today. Great articles appear in relatively obscure places. (And odd things sometimes find their way into major journals.) Plus, legal publishing has been both fragmented and democratized: specialty journals, faculty peer reviewed journals, interdisciplinary journals, all now play important roles in the intellectual ecology.
The Michigan Law Review publishes a useful annual review of new law books, but there’s nothing comparable for legal articles, some of which are almost as long as books (or are future books). Today, new intermediaries, notably subject-oriented legal blogs, provide useful if sometimes erratic notices and observations regarding the very latest scholarship. But there’s still a gap: other than asking the right person, there’s no easy and obvious way to find out what’s new, important, and interesting in most areas of the law.
Jotwell will help fill that gap. We will not be afraid to be laudatory, nor will we give points for scoring them. Rather, we will challenge ourselves and our colleagues to share their wisdom and be generous with their praise. We will be positive without apology.
Tell us what we ought to read!
How It Works
Jotwell will be organized in sections, each reflecting a subject area of legal specialization. Each section, with its own url of the form sectionname.jotwell.com, will be managed by a pair of Section Editors who will have independent editorial control over that section. The Section Editors will also be responsible for selecting a team of ten or more Contributing Editors. Each of these editors will commit to writing at least one Jotwell essay of 500-1000 words per year in which they identify and explain the significance of one or more significant recent works – preferably an article accessible online, but we won’t be doctrinaire about it. Our aim is to have at least one contribution appear in each section on a fixed day every month, although we won’t object to more. Section Editors will also be responsible for approving unsolicited essays for publication. Our initial sections will cover administrative law, constitutional law, corporate law, criminal law, cyberlaw, intellectual property law, legal profession, and tax law — and we intend to add new sections when there is interest in doing so.
For the legal omnivore, the ‘front page’ at Jotwell.com will contain the first part of every essay appearing elsewhere on the site. Links will take you to the full version in the individual sections. There, articles will be open to comments from readers.
The Details
Learn more about Jotwell:
