As a student at Yale Law School in 1974, Lani Guinier attended a class with a white male professor who addressed all of the students, male and female, as "gentlemen." To him the greeting was a form of honorific. It evoked the traditional values of legal education to train detached, "neutral" problem solvers. To her it was profoundly alienating.
This volume tells the story of legal education through the experiences of women. It chronicles the disappointments of women as they enter previously male-dominated institutions and, to a surprising extent, remain isolated, marginalized, and dissatisfied. It shows how the hierarchical, competitive approach to training lawyers inhibits many women and some men.
But the book is a critique, not a complaint. The authors argue that conventional approaches to legal education do not educate or evaluate all students based on their potential to either learn or do the job of good lawyers, nor do these approaches explore the range of skills students could bring to the profession.
In questioning what it means to be qualified, what a fair goal in education might be, and what we can learn from diversity, Becoming Gentlemen offers invaluable lessons not only for education but for society in general.

"Becoming Gentlemen is an important contribution to the compelling body of literature that demonstrates that gender discrimination in our colleges and professional schools is often subtle but insidious and even dangerous. Guinier, Fine, and Balin reveal the educational practices that often undermine the success of our most gifted and ambitious female students. Parents of girls should read this account of what could await their daughters in manyeducational settings."

--Ruth Simmons, President of Smith College
"[Lani Guinier] confronts issues of race, political participation, and democracy forcefully and provocatively, invigorating the dialogue on these issues."
--U.S. Senator Bill Bradley
"There is no doubt that [Guinier's] powerful voice will produce good consequences for our nation and our world."
--Cornel West, author of Race Matters
"An important and startling work by a provocative national figure."
--Kirkus Reviews

Developed to serve as a vital link in the global chain of information, this convenient directory contains the most comprehensive list of names, addresses, and telephone numbers of government, judicial, and legislative leaders worldwide. Contact information is provided for nearly 10,000 key people in 191 countries. Web sites are also included in a separate index for quick reference.

Stephen L. Carter tells what's wrong with our confirmation process, explains how it got that way, and suggests what we can do to fix it. Using the most recent confirmation battles as examples, Carter argues that our confirmation process will continue to be bloody until we develop a more balanced attitude toward public service and the Supreme Court by coming to recognize that human beings have flaws, commit sins, and can be redeemed.

Felix Frankfurter's blustery depiction of debate within the Supreme Court suggests that combat sometimes supersedes collegiality in those hallowed halls. In fact, as Phillip Cooper shows, conflict is an inescapable fact of life in the Marble Temple.

Cooper peels back the calm, quiet public image of our judicial royalty to reveal their "family" feuds and squabbles. He shows that, whether motivated by deeply felt principle or by petty and vindictive impulses, these disputes dramatically shape the court's decision-making process, the justices' relations with one another, and the public's perception of the court.

Filled with wonderful vignettes and telling anecdotes, Battles on the Bench illuminates the court's legendary and little-known clashes from John Marshall to Ruth Ginsberg and helps us understand why they fight, how they fight, and why their fights matter. In the process, it reveals a long tradition of strategic flattery, cajolery, name-calling, threats, subterfuge, and sermonizing-all in an effort to win over or run over fellow justices.

Conflict in such high-stakes circumstances is hardly unexpected. But some of the court behavior is: Fred Vinson going after Frankfurter with a clenched fist and shouting that "no son of a bitch can ever say that to me "; Frankfurter's dismissal of Justice Reed's intellect as "largely vegetable"; James McReynolds' undisguised anti-semitism toward Louis Brandeis; Antonin Scalia's harsh attacks on Sandra Day O'Connor; and William Rehnquist's sarcastic recital of a nursery rhyme and the "Star-Spangled Banner" before his startled brethren.

Cooper, however, makes clear that to a surprising degree these justices do find ways to work together. As Earl Warren noted, life on the Court is like a marriage-one can't tolerate it if it's one battle after another. Appointed for life and completely independent, these "nine scorpions in a bottle" are nevertheless compelled to furl their stingers from time to time-for no justice can prevail without the support of at least four others. Indeed, one of the toughest questions Cooper tries to answer is why they don't fight more often.

A rich treasure trove mined from the vast resources of judicial biography, Cooper's engaging study will be especially appealing to students and general readers with limited knowledge of the court's inner workings.

The fundamental thesis of Constitutional Law as Fiction is that in writing the opinion that explains a judgment, a judge not only analyzes and organizes precedent and makes and defends policy or value judgments, but he or she also tells a story, much as a historian does.

Like a history, this story has the appearance of simple truth, but, in fact, of necessity, it is a "fiction" as well--not in the sense of a lie or fairy tale, but in the sense of a constructed meaning. Strangely enough, these fictions persuade those who read them and those who write them, and without this persuasion, the law would lose much of its authority. L. H. LaRue examines several critical Supreme Court cases, including Everson v. Board of Education and Marbury v. Madison, and specifically examines the rhetorical techniques of Chief Justice John Marshall.

In analyzing the construction of meaning in the rhetoric of the law, LaRue ultimately contends that judges must not abandon the "fictions" in their judgments; they must strive to improve them.

In this unprecedented look at the culture of American lawyering, Lincoln Caplan shows us Skadden's origins in the white-shoe postwar legal world and its rise to preeminence in the era of Drexel Burnham Lambert - the firm's largest client in the eighties. Skadden is revealed as a place that prizes opportunists but which also created a $10 million program to support public-interest lawyers. In Caplan's probing and even-handed account, the story of Joe Flom's firm illuminates an era in America business and society.

This third edition provides thoroughly updated information on the status of women in all aspects of the U.S. criminal justice system, from incarcerated women to professionals in the legal, law enforcement, and correctional fields. While concentrating on the present, Clarice Feinman traces changes in theories, goals, practices, and policies concerning women of different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds--be they offenders, professionals, or reformers--since 1800, with a focus on why changes occurred. This unique text is an important tool for filling gaps in information, continuity, and understanding of issues affecting women in the up-hill battle to transform this male-dominated system.

Revered as the "People's Attorney," Louis D. Brandeis concluded a distinguished career by serving as an associate justice (1916-1939) of the U.S. Supreme Court. Philippa Strum argues that Brandeis--long recognized as a brilliant legal thinker and defender of traditional civil liberties-was also an important political theorist whose thought has become particularly relevant to the present moment in American politics.

Brandeis, Strum shows, was appalled by the suffering and waste of human potential brought on by industrialization, poverty, and a government increasingly out of touch with its citizens. In response, he developed a unique vision of a "worker's democracy" based on an economically independent and well-educated citizenry actively engaged in defining its own political destiny. She also demonstrates that, while Brandeis's thinking formed the basis of Woodrow Wilson's "New Freedom," it went well beyond Wilsonian Progressivism in its call for smaller governmental and economic units such as worker-owned businesses and consumer cooperatives.

Brandeis's political thought, Strum suggests, is especially relevant to current debates over how large a role government should play in resolving everything from unemployment and homelessness to the crisis in health care. One of the few justices to support Roosevelt's New Deal policies in the 1930s, he nevertheless consistently criticized concentrated power in government (and in corporations). He agreed that the government should provide its citizens with some sort of "safety net," but at the same time should empower people to find private solutions to their needs.

A half century later, Brandeis's political thought has much to offer anyone engaged in the current debates pitting individualists against communitarians and rights advocates against social welfare critics.

What makes a great judge? How are reputations forged? Why do some reputations endure, while others crumble? And how can we know whether a reputation is fairly deserved? In this ambitious book, Richard Posner confronts these questions in the case of Benjamin Cardozo. The result is both a revealing portrait of one of the most influential legal minds of our century and a model for a new kind of study--a balanced, objective, critical assessment of a judicial career. "The present compact and unflaggingly interesting volume ...is a full-bodied scholarly biography...It is illuminating in itself, and will serve as a significant contribution."--Paul A. Freund, New York Times Book Review

Since many legal disputes are battles over the meaning of a statute, contract, testimony, or the Constitution, judges must interpret language in order to decide why one proposed meaning overrides another. And in making their decisions about meaning appear authoritative and fair, judges often write about the nature of linguistic interpretation. In the first book to examine the linguistic analysis of law, Lawrence M. Solan shows that judges sometimes inaccurately portray the way we use language, creating inconsistencies in their decisions and threatening the fairness of the judicial system.
Solan uses a wealth of examples to illustrate the way linguistics enters the process of judicial decision making: a death penalty case that the Supreme Court decided by analyzing the use of adjectives in a jury instruction; criminal cases whose outcomes depend on the Supreme Court's analysis of the relationship between adverbs and prepositional phrases; and cases focused on the meaning of certain words in the Constitution. Solan finds that judges often describe our use of language poorly because there is no clear relationship between the principles of linguistics and the jurisprudential goals that the judge wishes to promote.
A major contribution to the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on law and its social and cultural context, Solan's lucid, engaging book is equally accessible to linguists, lawyers, philosophers, anthropologists, literary theorists, and political scientists.

Portrays the rise and fall of one of the largest law frims in America.

In this reprint from 1988, Abel (law, U. of California, Los Angeles) and Lewis (Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford, UK) put together eight chapters in which contributors, who are sociology and law professors from around the world, each describe the law profession in their respective countries: Canada, the US, Scotland, England and Wales, Austra

This is the second of three volumes on the comparative sociology of legal professions. Whereas the first volume looked at the major common law countries, this one shifts attention to eleven civil law professions, looking at Belgium, Brazil, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and Venezuela. Abel (law, U. of C

In this first general history of legal education, Stevens traces the development of law schools, the legal profession, and legal thought, relating their evolution to intellectual, political, and social trends. He describes how the establishment gained power over education after 1920 and how, in the past two decades, both students and the practicing profession have questioned this authority. He also examines the implications of the ""legal revolution"" and new opportunities for women and minorities. |This book uniquely reveals the history and legacy of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study through a comprehensive collection of documents: articles, reports, letters, and newspaper accounts, as well as works of fiction, poetry, and drama.

This volume presents a selection of 500 letters by Clarence Darrow, the pre-eminent courtroom lawyer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Randall Tietjen selected these letters from over 2,200 letters in archives around the country, as well as from one remarkable find - the kind of thing historians dream about: a cache of about 330 letters by Darrow hidden away in the basement of Darrow's granddaughter's house. This collection provides the first scholarly edition of Darrow's letters, expertly annotated and including a large amount of previously unknown material and hard-to-locate letters. Because Darrow was a gifted writer and led a fascinating life, the letters are a delight to read. This volume also presents a major introduction by the editor, along with a chronology of Darrow's life, and brief biographical sketches of the important individuals who appear in the letters.

When young Kirvin Kade Legett arrived in Buffalo Gap, Texas, in 1879, his principal assets were a good horse and saddle and a license to practice law. When the Texas and Pacific Railroad, building west from Fort Worth, missed Buffalo Gap, the young attorney moved on to Abilene, then a tent city with only two items for sale, "a train ticket to git away or a drink to make you willing to stay." The man and the country were to grow up together.Legett's early clients were buffalo hunters, bone collectors, sheepherders, cattlemen, and farmers, but he eventually handled cases of statewide and even out-of-state importance. Although he refused to seek public office, he had some say about those who did, and most serious candidates for state offices sought his counsel and support. A stock farmer and rancher as well as practicing attorney, Legett was a forceful early advocate of farm diversification and did much to further the development of West Texas agriculture, business, oil exploration, and education. Judge Legett was a pioneer and a man of stature; his life story is, in a real sense, an epitome of the history of West Texas, especially of the Abilene area. By the time of Legett's death, that rowdy railroad town had become a thriving, modern city. Vernon Gladden Spence's biography, based on an extensive collection of private papers, offers a clear and detailed portrait of a man whose energies and talents helped turn a wilderness into a habitable and productive country.

'As thrilling as a detective novel.' The Times 'Powerful, moving and often captivating.' Financial Times 'A compelling read for anyone who cares about fairness, justice and humanity.' Observer The Sunday Times bestseller ___ Sarah Langford is a barrister. Her job is to stand in court representing the mad and the bad, the vulnerable, the heartbroken and the hopeful. She must become their voice. Sarah weaves their story around the black and white of the law and tell it to the courtroom. These stories may not make headlines but they will change the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary ways. They are stories which, but for a twist of luck, might have been yours. With remarkable candour, Sarah describes eleven cases which reveal what goes on in our criminal and family courts: these are tales of domestic fall out, everyday burglary, sexual indiscretion, and children caught up in the law. They are sometimes shocking and they are often heart-stopping. She examines how she feels as she defends the person standing in the dock. She also shows us how our attitudes and actions can shape not only the outcome of a case, but the legal system itself. ___ What readers are saying: ***** 'Absolutely fascinating . . . thought provoking, powerful and a compelling read.' ***** 'This book broke my heart at times but also contained humour and such poignant insights into the criminal justice system.' ***** 'Sarah writes incredibly well - she's informative while maintaining suspense and tension, and conveys so much emotion in her writing

The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testament to her own extraordinary determination and the power of believing in oneself. Here is the story of a precarious childhood, with an alcoholic father (who would die when she was nine) and a devoted but overburdened mother, and of the refuge a little girl took from the turmoil at home with her passionately spirited paternal grandmother. But it was when she was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes that the precocious Sonia recognized she must ultimately depend on herself. She would learn to give herself the insulin shots she needed to survive and soon imagined a path to a different life.

Over the past several decades, the number of lawyers in large cities has doubled, women have entered the bar at an unprecedented rate, and the scale of firms has greatly expanded. This immense growth has transformed the nature and social structure of the legal profession. In the most comprehensive analysis of the urban bar to date, "Urban Lawyers" presents a compelling portrait of how these changes continue to shape the field of law today.
Drawing on extensive interviews with Chicago lawyers, the authors demonstrate how developments in the profession have affected virtually every aspect of the work and careers of urban lawyers-their relationships with clients, job tenure and satisfaction, income, social and political values, networks of professional connections, and patterns of participation in the broader community. Yet despite the dramatic changes, much remains the same. Stratification of income and power based on gender, race, and religious background, for instance, still maintains inequality within the bar.
The authors of "Urban Lawyers" conclude that organizational priorities will likely determine the future direction of the legal profession. And with this landmark study as their guide, readers will be able to make their own informed predictions.

From prosecuting (and defending) murderers in the Bronx to handling the public and private problems of Manhattan's elite, "Mouthpiece" recounts the colorful adventures of New York City's ultimate legal operator.
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"In the pages before us, the Counselor tells a saga's worth of tales of the city. As the saying goes, he's got a million of them." "--"Tom Wolfe, from his Introduction
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Edward Hayes is that unusual combination: the likable lawyer, one who could have stepped off the stages of "Guys and Dolls" or "Chicago." "Mouthpiece" is his story--an irreverent, entertaining, and revealing look at the practice of law in modern times and a social and political anatomy of New York City. It recounts Hayes's childhood in the tough Irish sections of Queens and his eventual escape to the University of Virginia and then to Columbia Law School. Not at all white-shoe-firm material, Hayes headed to the hair-raising, crime-ridden South Bronx of the midseventies--first as a homicide prosecutor and then as a defense attorney seeking to free the same sort of people he formerly had put in jail.
Tom Wolfe immortalized this setting in "The Bonfire of the Vanities." Ed Hayes was his guide, and he served as the model for the scrappy defense lawyer Tommy Killian. Eventually, Hayes moved his practice to Manhattan, using his neighborhood white boy instincts and connections and the rough-and-tumble techniques learned in the Bronx on behalf of the rich and powerful and famous. From a high-stakes legal shootout over the Andy Warhol estate to working to secure financial justice for the families of the World Trade Center victims, Hayes has been behind the scenes of how New York City really operates.
For the tens of millions fascinated by New York's unique blend of glitter and grime, of idealism and corruption, of avarice and ambition, "Mouthpiece" provides the ultimate close-up of high-stakes Gotham gamesmanship.

Oliver Wendell Holmes escaped death twice as a young Union officer in the Civil War. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, unremitting scorn for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. During his nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, he wrote a series of opinions that would prove prophetic in securing freedom of speech, protecting the rights of criminal defendants, and ending the Court's reactionary resistance to social and economic reforms. As a pioneering legal scholar, Holmes revolutionized the understanding of common law. As an enthusiastic friend, he wrote thousands of letters brimming with an abiding joy in fighting the good fight. Drawing on many previously unpublished letters and records, Stephen Budiansky offers the fullest portrait yet of this pivotal American figure.