Beyond Elite Law

This book describes the access to justice crisis facing low- and middle-income Americans and the current reforms to address it.

Orientation and commencement? Making Elite Lawyers is the first detailed study of legal education at America's premier law school. Drawing on in-depth interviews, student questionnaires, and his own classroom observations, author Robert Granfield documents the conservatizing effects of the Harvard legal education on a broad cross-section of the student population, paying particular attention to the fate of women, students of color, and those from working-class.

You Don't Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism highlights how race and gender create barriers to recruitment, professional development, and advancement to partnership for black women in elite corporate law firms.

One L, Scott Turow's journal of his first year at law school and a best-seller when it was first published in 1977, has gone on to become a virtual bible for prospective law students. Not only does it introduce with remarkable clarity the ideas and issues that are the stuff of legal education; it brings alive the anxiety and competiveness--with others and, even more, with oneself--that set the tone in this crucible of character building. Each September, a new crop of students enter Harvard Law School to begin an intense, often grueling, sometimes harrowing year of introduction to the law. Turow's group of One Ls are fresh, bright, ambitious, and more than a little daunting. Even more impressive are the faculty. Will the One Ls survive? Will they excel? Will they make the Law Review, the outward and visible sign of success in this ultra-conservative microcosm? With remarkable insight into both his fellows and himself, Turow leads us through the ups and downs, the small triumphs and tragedies of the year, in an absorbing and thought-provoking narrative that teaches the reader not only about law school and the law but about the human beings who make them what they are. In the new afterword for this edition of One L, the author looks back on law school from the perspective of ten years' work as a lawyer and offers some suggestions for reforming legal education.

Traces the history of innovation and trust, demonstrating how the Internet offers new ways to rehabilitate and strengthen trust.

Veteran legal issues reporter Kim Eisler takes us behind the scenes into mega law firm Williams & Connolly, guiding us on a journey through the many storied cases that have served to shape current policies in public and private sector alike For the past twenty years, author and journalist Kim Eisler has covered the law firm of Williams & Connolly, first at American Lawyer Magazine, then for Legal Times and since 1993 as National Editor of Washingtonian Magazine. More than any other writer, Kim has unprecedented and unusual contacts and relationships with the partners, as well as a background knowledge and familiarity with the firm's history and personnel over the past two decades. In Masters of the Game, Eisler sets out to demonstrate how the disciples of Edward Bennett Williams went beyond anyone's expectations and came to occupy key roles in American culture and business. In the last ten years of his life, Williams, the founder of Williams and Connolly, often said he was building not just a law firm but a monument. Masters of the Game is not only about a law firm, but about how the philosophy and practices of this particular law firm have spread out beyond Washington to dominate business, finance, sports and the American psyche itself through its influence with past, present and future political, corporate and media figures.

Every day, in courtrooms around the United States, thousands of criminal defendants are represented by public defenders--lawyers provided by the government for those who cannot afford private counsel. Though often taken for granted, the modern American public defender has a surprisingly contentious history--one that offers insights not only about the "carceral state," but also about the contours and compromises of twentieth-century liberalism. First gaining appeal amidst the Progressive Era fervor for court reform, the public defender idea was swiftly quashed by elite corporate lawyers who believed the legal profession should remain independent from the state. Public defenders took hold in some localities but not yet as a nationwide standard. By the 1960s, views had shifted. Gideon v. Wainwright enshrined the right to counsel into law and the legal profession mobilized to expand the ranks of public defenders nationwide. Yet within a few years, lawyers had already diagnosed a "crisis" of underfunded, overworked defenders providing inadequate representation--a crisis that persists today. This book shows how these conditions, often attributed to recent fiscal emergencies, have deep roots, and it chronicles the intertwined histories of constitutional doctrine, big philanthropy, professional in-fighting, and Cold War culture that made public defenders ubiquitous but embattled figures in American courtrooms.