Lawyers and the Legal Profession

• Author: Ronit Dinovitzer and Bryant Garth
• Pages: 105-117

The Handbook of Law and Society, First Edition. Edited by Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Introduction

The legitimacy of law as a democratic institution is intimately tied to the structure

of the legal profession. It is through lawyers that we gain access to “law,” with the

profession playing a central role in mediating the relationship between the state and

its citizens more generally. With over one million lawyers in the United States

(Carson and Park 2012), understanding who lawyers are, how lawyers make their

careers, which lawyers attain elite positions, and whom lawyers serve are key issues

in terms of both access to the profession and the way that the profession serves the

ends of justice.

Our chapter draws on empirical research on the structure of the legal profession,

and examines perennial issues in the profession: divisions in the profession with

respect to prestige and clients served; related issues of pro bono, public interest law,

and access to justice; the professional autonomy of lawyers in relation to their clients;

unequal access to legal careers according to race, gender and socioeconomic

background; and the challenges faced by the legal profession in the face of new tech-

nologies and globalization. We will present the research approaches and findings

within these general domains.1

These domains inform most research on the legal profession. They are in some

sense perennial issues taken up anew by generations of researchers. From our own

theoretical perspective, however, the perennial questions also tell us much about the

structure of the legal profession in the United States. The legal field in the United

States, from a Bourdieusian (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) perspective, produces

the categories and shapes the interpretation of empirical research in ways that sus-

tain the hierarchies of the profession. The perennial research, as suggested below,

Lawyers and the Legal Profession

Ronit Dinovitzer and Bryant Garth

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