For many non-lawyers (and a good many lawyers), law school conjures up images of large lecture halls packed with students being instructed by an overbearing, authoritarian professor relentlessly posing a series of questions to the hapless students caught in the line of fire. As vividly perfected by the fictitious Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase, the pedagogy is commonly known as the “So...

Professional liability insurance crises in medicine have been intermittent, reaching magnitudes sucient to generate widespread concern only in the mid-1970s, the mid-1980s, and 2002-2003. It is easy for health policymakers and the public to view each crisis as an upswing of the same pendulum. Malpractice premiums rise, doctors accuse lawyers, lawyers point back at doctors, and legislatures deb...

What is the role of firms and markets in mediating the division of labor? This paper uses confidential microdata from the Census of Services to examine law firms' boundaries. We first examine how the specialization of lawyers and firms increases as lawyers' returns to specialization increase. In fields where lawyers increasingly specialize with market size, the relationship between the share of...

Regulators in Australia have gotten the message. Rather than relying solely on the traditional approach to attorney regulation that relies heavily on complaints-driven systems of prosecuting alleged misconduct after it occurs, they have instituted a regulatory regime to help lawyers develop an “ethical infrastructure” enabling their practices to address the type of conduct that often leads to c...

LW 1200. How Lawyers Think: An Introduction to American Legal Thought. 4 Hours. Introduces students to legal analysis by exploring the history of American legal thought. Perhaps more than any other, American society is governed by lawyers. Explores how innovations in legal theory both emerged from and helped shape policy responses to some of America’s biggest governance challenges, including ec...