This detailed portrait of American lawyers traces their efforts to professionalize during the last 100 years by erecting barriers to control the quality and quantity of entrants. Abel describes the rise and fall of restrictive practices that dampened competition among lawyers and with outsiders. He shows how lawyers simultaneously sought to increase access to justice while stimulating demand for services, and their efforts to regulate themselves while forestalling external control. Data on income and status illuminate the success of these efforts. Charting the dramatic transformation of the profession over the last two decades, Abel documents the growing number and importance of lawyers employed outside private practice (in business and government, as judges and teachers) and the displacement of corporate clients they serve. Noting the complexity of matching ever more diverse entrants with more stratified roles, he depicts the mechanism that law schools and employers have
created to allocate graduates to jobs and socialize them within their new environments. Abel concludes with critical reflections on possible and desirable futures for the legal profession.
Industry Reviews
"Richard Abel's most recent project has turned contemporary history like a craftsman to provide us with a punctilious chronicle of a transformative period in English legal politics. The rishness of English Lawyers lets us see individuals and institutions respond to one another, develop and lose credibility, succeed and fail in the marketplace od ideas, and parlay those positions into future successes and losses. We can watch lawyers hoist the
profession and themselveswith their own rhetorical petard, and we also witness the interaction of argumentation, ideology, and interests in modern politics."--Law and Politics Book Review
"In this outstanding book, Abel provides a wide-ranging and provocative treatment of the American legal profession. He masterfully synthesizes a large volume of literature...and brings a wealth of data to bear on a variety of important topics....Although many fine studies of the American legal profession have appeared in the past 20 years, none are so systematic and comprehensive. Highly recommended."--Choice
"A provocative and often disturbing portrait of American lawyers....Comprehensive and compelling."--ABA Journal
"Powerful and eloquent...[Abel's] work will serve as the standard reference for many generations....Should be read by every member of the legal profession, especially the leaders of the organized bar."--Texas Law Review
"Abel has an ax to grind--fortunately an ax in serious need of grinding....The book should be read for its important insights."--The Nation
"The first comprehensive treatment of the American legal profession since Blaustein & Porter's book of 1954. American Lawyers is also an extremely useful compendium of historical and contemporary research about lawyers, illustrated through the assembly and interpretive synthesis of a vast amount of statistical data on the profession since the late 19th century. No other scholar even approaches Abel in easy command of these sources....Its
synthesis of quantitative work will be of enduring value."--Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law School
"Should have a major impact on the field. It offers a provocative--and critical--interpretation of the profession at large that has the potential to become an important text, a useful reference point, and a book to engender debate in the profession."--Terence Halliday, Deputy Director, American Bar Foundation
"Richard Abel's American Lawyers offers a masterful and provocative synthesis of an immense range of information, until now virtually unobtainable, about the legal profession in the United States. It is an absolutely indispensable starting point for understanding the role of lawyers in American society."--Marc S. Galanter, University of Wisconsin Law School
"A vital resource for any scholar in the field of the legal profession. More importantly, it ought to be read by every lawyer and those who care about the future of the legal profession."--Robert Stevens, Chancellor, University of California, Santa Cruz
"Professor Abel's book shows that in the last hundred years, the largest legal profession in the world has mirrored the workings of power, the dynamics of social inequality, the ideological contradictions and dreams of reform of American society. He leaves not one aspect unexamined and not one stone unturned. This is an unprecedented, definitive, and exemplary work."--Magali Sarfatti Larson, Temple University
"Abel's tour de force is both a penetrating examination of radical, critical, and functional traditions in the sociology of the professions and a coherent interpretation of a vast amont of empirical data about lawyers."--William L.F. Felstiner, Director, American Bar Foundation
"A sophisticated and extraordinarily well-documented critical analysis of the disturbing changes going on in the American legal profession today, which does not avoid the task of suggesting reforms by which the profession can justify preserving its privileges."--Eliot Freidson, New York University
"American Lawyers is a brilliant synthesis of theoretical and empirical research on the past, present, and future of the American legal profession by its closest student and leading academic critic. It will help set the agenda for academic and policy debates about the role of lawyers in our society."--David M. Trubek, University of Wisconsin
"Abel's American Lawyers is by far the most comprehensive treatment of the subject. He has synthesized data from diverse and fugitive sources, and he gives us a sustained analysis of the bar's ironic progress in two, apparently contradictory, directions. As Abel demonstrates, the legal profession over the past several decades has become more homogeneous in social class of origin while, at the same time, it became more highly stratified by
differentiation in clientele and in the corresponding styles of legal work."--John F. Heinz, Distinguished Research Fellow, American Bar Foundation
"Richard Abel's most recent project has turned contemporary history like a craftsman to provide us with a punctilious chronicle of a transformative period in English legal politics. The rishness of English Lawyers lets us see individuals and institutions respond to one another, develop and lose credibility, succeed and fail in the marketplace od ideas, and parlay those positions into future successes and losses. We can watch lawyers hoist the
profession and themselveswith their own rhetorical petard, and we also witness the interaction of argumentation, ideology, and interests in modern politics."--Law and Politics Book Review
