BACKGROUND Self-employed workers experience occupational stress and may suffer from various mental health disorders. AIMS To assess the mental health, substance use and risk factors for psychological distress in a sample of self-employed lawyers and pharmacists. METHODS A cross-sectional study, using self-completion postal questionnaires, of lawyers and pharmacists. The General Health Quest...

Divorce and the Excess Burden of Lawyers We present a model where divorcing spouses can choose to hire lawyers in their divorce process. Spouses encounter incentives as in the classical prisoners’ dilemma: Despite the zero sum nature of the game and the lawyers’ fees, each spouse has an incentive to hire a lawyer. We propose a simple institutional setting allowing for joint lawyers in order to ...

A report on the 5th Internet, Law and Politics conference hosted by the UOC in July 2009. The author, who attended the conference as rapporteur and wrote a ‘live blog’ during the two-day event, reviews some of the contributions, reflects on the theme of social networking sites (‘pro or con?’) and explores the different approaches of the disciplines of law and of political science, suggesting th...

In a series of influential papers, Lester Brickman (2003a, 2003b, 2004) has argued that the income and effective hourly rate of tort lawyers using contingent fees has increased by 1400% since 1960 and that the market for contingent fee lawyers is uncompetitive as evidenced by lack of price advertising and uniform pricing across practitioners, cases and time. He also argues that contingent fee l...