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Large law firms face increasing financial pressure as the market for legal services becomes increasingly competitive. This has required unprecedented attention to running firms as profitable enterprises, and to monitoring the productivity of lawyers. Some observers claim that this means that law practice has been transformed from a profession to a business. This book examines that claim by drawing on more than 270 interviews with partners in major firms. These interviews reveal a more complex reality. It is true that firms place greater demands than ever on partners for economic productivity. They emphasize the importance of being entrepreneurial in seeking out business, terminate partners who are deemed insufficiently productive, give greater weight to business development in compensation decisions, and recruit partners from other firms who can increase profitability. All these measures can make it difficult for a firm to create a distinctive culture that binds its partners together. They risk creating a sense among partners that the firm is no more than a business enterprise that strives for profitability, and that self-interested behavior is the best course of action. At the same time, interviews indicate that partners continue to regard non-financial professional values as significant sources of satisfaction. Firms that can credibly signal that they regard these values as intrinsically important, while simultaneously devoting attention to financial performance, have the potential to elicit partner commitment by providing both financial and professional rewards. This book describes and assesses how firms approach the challenge of striking this difficult balance.

Lawyers today are in a moral crisis. The popular perception of the lawyer, both within the legal community and beyond, is no longer the Abe Lincoln of American mythology, but is often a greedy, cynical manipulator of access and power. This book goes beyond the caricatures to explore the deeper causes of why lawyers are losing their profession and what it will take to bring it back. The book draws on experiences as a lawyer, judge, and law teacher, as well as upon oral histories of lawyers and judges, in this exploration of how and why the legal profession has lost its ennobling mythology. Effectively using examples from history, philosophy, psychology, mythology, and literature, the book shows that the loss of professionalism is more than merely the emergence of win-at-all-cost strategies and a scramble for personal wealth. It is something more profound—a loss of professional community and soul. The book identifies the old heroic myths of American lawyers and shows how they informed the values of professionalism through the middle of the last century. It shows why, in our more diverse society, those myths are inadequate guides for today's lawyers. And the book also discusses the profession's agony over its trickster image and demonstrates how that archetype is not only a psychological reality, but a necessary component of a vibrant professional mythology for lawyers.

A timely and multifaceted portrait of the lawyers who serve the diverse constituencies of the conservative movement, this book explains what unites and divides lawyers for the three major groups—social conservatives, libertarians, and business advocates—that have coalesced in recent decades behind the Republican Party. Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than seventy lawyers who represent conservative and libertarian non-profit organizations, the book explores their values and identities, and traces the implications of their shared interest in promoting political strategies that give lawyers leading roles. The book goes on to illuminate the function of mediator organizations—such as the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy—that have succeeded in promoting cooperation among different factions of conservative lawyers. Such cooperation, it finds, has aided efforts to drive law and the legal profession politically rightward and to give lawyers greater prominence in the conservative movement. The book concludes, though, that tensions between the conservative law movement's elite and populist elements may ultimately lead to its undoing.

Enfranchisement, referring to the right to vote and to serve on a jury, is understood as the bedrock of civic participation but is not often thought of as particularly radical, a term saved for more revolutionary or rebellious acts directed outside of formal institutions. The meaning of radical enfranchisement developed in this book is activated by precisely this tension: jurors who have an orientation of radical enfranchisement hold institutional power, but they are aware that this does not imply obedience, technocratic applications of the law, or an affirmation of dogmatic prejudices, and this leads to a type of freedom often not found for ordinary people in political life. Radical enfranchisement is a different type of power that cultivates citizens who are well-versed in their legal stature, able to scrutinize their own biases, and emboldened by the critical role they play in questions of punishment. The civic education that precedes the radical enfranchisement of jurors is a metacognitive endeavor, demanding that jurors pay attention to how they make decisions and not just the verdicts themselves. The argument for radical enfranchisement begins with an examination of how the political maturity of jurors within the criminal justice system is overlooked by one of its greatest proponents, Alexis de Tocqueville, at great cost to his analysis of democratic innovations. Then the project focuses on three key moments during the trial, each taken up in a chapter, where a change in the civic education of jurors can have a dramatic impact on the process.