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Despite well documented proof that both the number and diversity of amicus participation in state high courts has been growing, little progress has been made in determining whether or not amicus briefs influence state court outcomes or the mechanism through which this influence is exerted. By utilizing an original dataset of amicus briefs filed in all products liability cases across the fifty states from 1995-2010, this paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of amicus influence on state supreme court decision making. Capitalizing on cross-state comparisons, this paper explores existing theories of amicus influence on court outcomes while also exploring how this influence is conditioned by institutional design across states - specifically, differing methods of judicial retention. Products liability cases offer a unique opportunity to examine the effects of third-party amicus briefs on the decision-making of state high courts because the two groups that are attributed with igniting the explosion in judicial campaign spending - pro-business groups and plaintiffs' lawyers groups -often participate as amicus curiae. Using this set of cases, this paper finds that amicus brief influence is conditioned by court structure such that judges are more responsive to their ideological allies in courts where judges are free from electoral pressure. However, where courts are exposed to electoral pressures, amici influence encourages courts to render decisions that run counter to constituent ideology in favor of moneyed, corporate interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based both on fieldwork and documental research in the Brazilian Attorney's General Office, the paper shall discuss the transformation of that institution into one who's official task is to provide Access to Justice through the pursuit of class actions. Claiming the influence of 1970's Mauro Cappelletti's Access to Justice Project the assistants of the Attorney General Office have turned this institution into the self-called guardian of "diffuse and collective interests", as opposed to the interests of both the Government and the Market. Nevertheless, how that institution plays its new role on a day-to-day basis and how this actually improves Access to Justice is something that remains to be discussed.Drawing on empirical data, the paper shall try to reformulate questions which have been monopolising the debate on Access to Justice in Brazil. Instead of aiming at the effectiveness of Law the paper will be focusing on how can we measure such a thing as Access to Justice; what is Access to Justice; what does it mean to talk about diffuse or collective interests. On a more abstract level the paper aims at discussing the influence of social sciences in the construction of legal institutions and legal instruments.Regarding its sociological background, the paper explicitly claims the influence of Bruno Latour's and Yan Thomas' approaches to legal phenomena. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports preliminary results from a study of a random sample of federal case filings in employment discrimination cases from 1990-2003, as well as qualitative interviews with parties and lawyers involved in a subsample of cases. Statistical analyses examine the nature and outcomes of cases. The qualitative data examine how parties and lawyers viewed the cases and their experience with the discrimination litigation system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan experienced a boom in two kinds of citizen litigation, information disclosure and taxpayer suits against local governments, during the 1990s. The social movement lawyers who brought these kinds of suits were more similar to their clients and more diverse in their strategies than was true for the landmark pollution and employment discrimination cases in the 1960s and 1970s. Information disclosure and taxpayer plaintiffs were much better able to understand and participate in legal processes than were many earlier plaintiff groups. The gap between professional norms and political goals for these cause lawyers was small because the goals of the movement conformed to the ideals of legal liberalism. The citizen litigation movement provided an alternative form of political participation in response to the decline of Left parties and local elected governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Supreme Court tried to specifically limit the holding of Bush v Gore to the instant facts. However, in the decade since the decision, lawyers and judges have repeatedly cited it and some have sought to expand its precedential value for both election and nonelection related cases. In short, judges have used the opinion to expand the equal protection analysis of election related claims. While litigants have attempted to push the Bush v Gore analysis into other topic areas, the courts have generally been unwilling to allow it. Finally, because a growing body of litigants point to Bush v Gore as appropriately guiding non-election related questions, it remains to be seen if, in the long run, Bush v Gore will remain a precedent of limited application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using evidence from the timing of litigation initiated in the recent same sex marriage cases in the United States, we consider how the local media's expressed support for a particular cause influences the likelihood that cause lawyers for a social movement will initiate a legal action in that location and at that point. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study I explore how individuals make judgements about what motivates the behavior of others. I focus on how variation in the way a legal case is presented - specifically whether or not procedural information is included - affects the way individuals evaluate the motivations of a much-maligned political actor - the lawyer. The findings have implications for our understanding of how individuals make inferences about the motivations of political actors and how these attributions are tied to evaluations of political institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how lawyers directly involved in disputes over the regulation of anti-abortion protests interpret and use law, the litigation process, and their professional responsibilities when constructing post-litigation narratives. By asking how these elements do or do not matter in lawyers’ narratives, the paper examines: (1) how the lawyers understand and balance commitments to their profession and the social causes they represent, and (2) the varying techniques and abilities to use, produce, and resist law and power after the courts have given their final rulings. The paper thus adds to the growing literature concerned with the relationship between lawyers (cause and non-cause alike) and social movements. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effect of lawyer capability on the success of lawyers before state supreme courts in civil cases. Previous research has analyzed the decision-making process of jurists in various contexts; however, this research has neglected to consider the effect of lawyer quality on the decision-making process in state supreme courts. This paper argues that lawyer capability has some measurable effect on litigation success in this forum because more capable lawyers are able to better able to provide information to the court and these lawyers also have more institutional expertise. However, this paper also posits that this effect is qualified by the selection and retention mechanism employed by the state supreme court. .x000d..x000d.[NOTE: This paper is part of my dissertation]. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the importance of lawyers' arguments to the judicial decision-making process through a study of the strategies employed by environmental and property rights advocates in two important U.S. Supreme Court cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper will examine the existing literaure on the work of plaintiffs' personal injury lawyers in an attempt to find commonalities among these attorneys despite different specializations and local regulations. Plaintiffs' attorneys are said to be a diverse and unique group. Thus, many scholars have asked if plaintiffs' lawyers in different states or different specializations are comparable. My paper will try to develop an analysis of the common practices of plaintiffs' attorneys to better inform this debate. I will then compare my findings about plaintiffs' attorneys in Indiana with the findings in the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shift to a new paradigm of law-making, from the New Deal command-and-control regulatory model to a new collaborative governance model, has triggered a transformation in the nature of cause lawyering. Under the traditional regulatory model, public interest lawyers have engaged in a regulatory (or "'rule of law' - Tarlock) litigation strategy, in which they struggled to persuade courts to define and enforce duties in a top-down legal setting. The emerging post-regulatory governance model promotes collaborative decision-making, integrated stakeholder participation on the implementation and enforcement of policies, and pragmatic, experimentalist, and adaptive learning strategies. While legal regulation often functions as a 'penalty default', parties are expected to act collaboratively seeking mutually acceptable arrangements in a semi-voluntary environment. Social movements and for-profit corporate interests, as well as private actors and public agencies, are repositioning themselves, in the terms of Martha Minow, as 'partners, not rivals.' In this new environment, lawyers seek to redefine their roles in representing social movements. The roles of movement lawyers are changing from adversarial, zealous advocates and rule-enforcers to creative problem-solvers, facilitators of consensus-building efforts, team players in interdisciplinary networks, and coordinators of information sharing and dynamic learning. Lawyers must now grapple with divisions of labor, authority, and allegiance that are increasingly fluid and informal. The paper describes this transformation in three contexts, that of the new workplace, including the shift to next-generation employment discrimination strategies, the environmental movement in its turn to collaborative ecosystem management structures, and the emerging movement for cyber-democracy and free access to information technologies. The paper explores the promises and perils of the emerging governance regime for social movement lawyering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will compare the attitudes of consumer class action plaintiffs' lawyers and their clients toward the class action device. Using a series of in-person and telephone interviews, the paper will analyze the similarities and differences between consumer class action lawyers and their clients on three fundamental aspects of the litigation process: (1) their goals in initiating a case; (2) whether those goals change throughout the lawsuit; and (3) whether they feel that the class action mechanism was fair, regardless of the result of the case. The project will also study the extent to which lawyers accurately understand their clients' attitudes in these three areas, and whether they attempt to monitor or alter their clients' attitudes during the course of their representation. This paper is a first step in filling a significant gap in the literature on attitudes toward litigation, lawyer-client interaction and effective representation. While the literature analyzing these questions in individual cases is extensive, little scholarly attention has been paid to these issues in the class action context. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For years scholars have suggested that attorneys with more extensive expertise may be able to achieve a higher rate of success for their clients. However, there has been little systematic investigation of this claim. In 1999 Haire, Lindquist and Hartley began to address this insufficiency by publishing a study examining the relationship between attorney expertise and litigant success in the United States Courts of Appeals. Haire, et. al., concluded that in at least some situations attorneys with more expertise achieve a higher rate of positive outcomes in federal appellate litigation. This paper will show that a more developed research design fails to reveal any such relationship at the federal appellate level. When controlling for plaintiff/defendant and appellant/appellee status, there is no statistically significant difference in the win percentages of attorneys based on their number of appearances before the federal appellate courts, whether they have clerked for a federal appellate judge, specialization in the subject area of the litigation, Martindale-Hubbell rating, law school achievement, or a cumulative index incorporating of all of these factors. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyze results from an experimental vignette study in which 83 personal injury lawyers were asked to evaluate a hypothetical products liability case. Half of the lawyers practice in states considered to be difficult jurisdictions for the practice of personal injury law due to tort reform and conservative political climates (Texas and Colorado), while the other half work in states that have been relatively unaffected by tort reform and are considered to be more "plaintiff friendly" (Pennsylvania and Massachusetts). While lawyers in reform states and non-reform states were equally likely to accept the hypothetical case with which they were presented, they approached the case in different ways, used different theories of liability, and made different arguments in order to justify their acceptance of the case. I close the paper with a discussion of the practical and theoretical implications of these differences in case screening and framing, including implications for access to justice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the late 1980s, the question of whether and to what extent legal representation affects case outcomes has attracted many scholars' attention. As part of the rising academic interest, a good number of empirical studies were published on this subject. This paper revisits this question and reports the result of an independent empirical study using the official data on more than 100,000 civil cases terminated in Taiwan from 2000 to 2006. Two questions are of main interest: whether cases with representation by lawyers are more likely to be settled and whether legal representation enhances a party's chance to obtain victory in tried cases. The empirical study reports that cases are most unlikely to be settled when both parties are represented by lawyers, while parties are most likely to settle the case when neither is represented. The study also shows that legal representation has no bearing on the case outcomes when the parties go to trial. Those two findings seem to raise the question of whether it is worthwhile to retain a lawyer when one is involved in a civil dispute in Taiwan. This paper establishes a theoretical framework to explain the empirical study results and answer that question. The author argues that it is the party's decision not to settle that leads to his/her seeking legal representation, not vice versa, so that the case-selection effect leads to the lowest settlement rate in the cases where both parties were represented. With regard to the cases not settled, the merits of the plaintiff's claim, not the fact of legal representation, dictate the result of the final judgment because of the judge's predominant role in the trial process in Taiwan. Viewed together, these two arguments suggest that the influence of lawyers on how a case is disposed of in Taiwan may not be as strong as their colleagues' influence in the United States. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine the numerous media representations of cause lawyer Ed Fagan. It will examine how, if cause litigants aresupposed to reflect, or be, the demographic addressed in class actionsuits, the lawyers who represent them have fallen into an identity politics warp as well. Classified bythe media in ways that reveal the inconsistencies inherent to causelitigation itself, Ed Fagan shows us the ways identity politics are atstake in cause litigation. Has he unethically usurped them, orethically exemplified a refusal to adhere to them? This paper willexplore Ed Fagan as a way of thinking about the ethics of stealing orrevealing identity politics' role in cause litigation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the complex interplay of legal and political mobilization in Sheff v. O'Neill, the Connecticut school desegregation case. Reform lawyers filed this case in 1989. In 1996, the Connecticut Supreme Court endorsed the reform lawyers' arguments. It held that the state constitution prohibited de facto segregation. Since then, the state has adopted a number of reforms channeling more money into poor urban districts and marginally expanding opportunities for participation in voluntary inter-district transfer programs. While these changes are welcome, the Hartford school district remains as segregated as it was in 1989. Sheff has been much studied by policy analysts and legal scholars. However, no detailed study of legal mobilization in Sheff exists. In this paper, I use a legal mobilization perspective to examine this controversy. While my perspective draws readily on existing theory (e.g. McCann 1994) it also adds a distinctive focus on "legal translation" as a core component of the broader notion of legal mobilization. The metaphor of translation implies a "carrying over" from one language or domain to another. This paper examines how this carrying over got done and how and why it mattered. I argue (1) that a legal mobilization perspective helps explain why the Sheff reform project succeeded in court and (2) how such liberal reform efforts might do better in politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes recent trends in federal employment discrimination litigation, proposes a research project that seeks to illuminate unknown aspects of the discrimination disputing system, and reports on preliminary fieldwork with lawyers and parties involved in discrimination disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I will examine exchanges between attorneys and witnesses in the courtroom in light of Grice's Cooperative Principle. Because of the restricted nature of the 'conversation' in a courtroom setting, as well as the importance of making one's own 'story' as convincing as possible, participants often try to find ways to say more than they are allowed to say. In several transcripts of jury trials, I have found many examples in which a participant in the 'conversation' is inviting an inference. Using examples of attorneys' questions and witnesses' answers, I will classify the examples according to which type of conversational strategy is used. I will then attempt to determine if particular strategies occur more (or less) frequently in particular situations (e.g. direct vs. cross-examination). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ongoing debate regarding the relations between Law and out-of-court negotiations. While some argue that negotiations are shaped in the shadow of the law, others claim that judges decide litigations in the shadow of informal settlements. This debate is accompanied by studies on the role played by judges, lawyers and litigants, most of which, however, are limited to one or two types of actors. This paper is based on research inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social fields. It looks at one legal field in an attempt to broaden our understanding of law in action while going beyond the debate on who acts under which shadow. The study was conducted in the Israeli legal field governing divorce. It included analysis of 360 divorce files and interviews with 16 divorcees and 27 professionals, including judges, lawyers, mediators and social workers. The findings of the study reveal the complex relations between the different actors and institutions present in the field. It was found that divorcees are ignorant of the law and rely on their lawyers as the main and often only source of information regarding legal and "accepted" norms. However, judges are not merely a "rubber stamp" and their presence, as well as the institutional characteristics of the judicial tribunal, affects the negotiations and their outcomes. The power of therapeutic professionals, another set of actors in divorce proceedings, is evident when divorcing parents do not agree on custody or visitation rights. In these cases judges order a social worker's report or a psychologist's opinion, and usually adopt the therapeutic professional's recommendation. Nonetheless, lawyers' ability to block the initiative to create a "mediation revolution" in the field, and the surrender of therapeutic professionals to the judicial expectation for a clear-cut recommendation, demonstrate that the field in which divorce arrangements are shaped is dominated by the legal habitus, i.e. legal professionals' patterned ways of understanding, judging and acting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the years, many have observed the similarities between law and religion. Few, however, have explored the multiple ways in which specific symbols are deployed by jurists and litigants to create and sustain constitutional belief systems. Weaving together constitutional law, cultural anthropology, and religious studies, this paper examines the ways in which the Supreme Court deploys sacred mantras, transformative imagery, and symbolic decisions to cultivate institutional authority and to maintain what Professor Sanford Levinson has called "our constitutional faith." Special treatment is given to the manner in which the Court has wielded Marbury v. Madison and Brown v. Board of Educ. over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deriving from empirical doctoral research focusing upon the understandings and currents of perception of actors on all sides involved in 64 mediations (130 data files-serious medical injury/fatality cases), this paper provides an ethnomethodological analysis of disputants and lawyers' disparate mediation aims (and linked views on who should attend) within the same/similar disputes. As such, it illustrates the materially divergent meanings ascribed to the mediation process and to dispute resolution in general. Surprising disparities were found not only as between lay disputants and legal actors (including plaintiffs/defendants and their own lawyers), but also within legal and lay actor groups on gender lines. Manifested in the very different things each camp aims to achieve during mediation, the findings illuminate several important paradoxes inherent in social and legal policy initiatives related to the resolution of civil disputes. On one level, the data represent a battle between legal versus extra-legal interests, indicating that mediation processes linked to the legal system are not being utilized to their maximum potential in terms of addressing disputants' intrinsic and often overriding extra-legal needs. Nevertheless, there was some evidence of the beginnings of lawyers' reconceptualization of their own roles in terms of thinking about and dealing with their cases on a more human, holistic basis. However, gender disempowerment within the preliminary stages of mediation was also evident-yet with a twist. This resulted in the ironic situation that female plaintiffs having input into who attended mediation might be contributing to their own disadvantage. A similar situation was evident in female plaintiffs discussing their mediation objectives and needs-being in some respects different to their male counterparts. Similarly, gender seemed to affect the way legal actors prioritized their mediation aims. Linked to this, female attorneys' discourse, regardless of which camp they were in, often evinced greater sensitivity than male lawyers to claimants' extra-legal aims and needs during mediation. As such, the findings add to the literature on mediation and legal consciousness (Cobb:1997; Ewick & Silbey:1998) as well as to critical feminist writings relating to dangers of informal dispute resolution processes for the disempowered, including women (Grillo:1991; Gilligan:1993; Mackinnon:1987). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In almost one quarter of employment discrimination cases filed in federal court, plaintiffs file without legal representation. Pro se plaintiffs have significantly worse outcomes than other plaintiffs. Based on an analysis of a random sample of 1788 cases drawn in 7 federal districts between 1988 to 2003, and in depth interviews with lawyers and parties in a subset of cases, this paper examines what variables predict whether a plaintiff obtains counsel and the effect of legal representation on case outcome. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do patent lawyers vary by focus on prosecution or litigation, by industry of client (e.g. biotech or engineering), by size of law firm, or by geography? This paper will present the initial work on a research project designed to explore how the culture and norms of practice within the different communities of patent lawyers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the outcomes of a random sample of 1800 employment discrimination case filings in federal court during the period 1987-2003. Quantitative data from coded case files and qualitative data from in-depth interviews with plaintiffs, defendants, and their lawyers suggest that employment discrimination litigation is a highly uncertain process that typically leads to unsatisfying results for parties. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the segmentation of the plaintiffs' bar, and what that segmentation means for how cases are pursued. The basic argument is that claimants' cases are shaped, in quite a drastic way, by what kind of lawyer that claimant ends up with. For example, a civil rights lawyer, a class action lawyer, and a personal injury lawyer are each likely to pursue the same jail strip search grievance, or the same complaint about disability parking placard fees, in very different ways. The project thus supplements the observation, made in several excellent studies of the plaintiffs bar, that more and less elite personal injury lawyers do very different tasks, on very different cases, for very different compensation. Rather than focusing on stratification, I examine segmentation and its results - and hope to demonstrate that in many situations, case facts and quality are endogenous to the choice of litigator. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will address the question of plaintiffs' lawyers' ethics in the disability context. It will examine two phenomena, one of which is (improperly) understood by many to be unethical, the other of which is (improperly) understood by many to raise no particular ethical question. The first phenomenon is the drumming up of litigation by plaintiffs' lawyers in public accommodations suits brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act; the second is the debilitating depiction of disability by plaintiffs' lawyers in personal-injury tort cases. In the public-accommodations context, still-prevalent intuitions about barratry stand in the way of the implementation of a 17-year-old law that remains incredibly underenforced; in the tort context, the imperative to increase a client's damages award can stand in the way of the further achievement of disability equality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that the RED represents the culmination of efforts by activist lawyers associated with the Starting Line Group (SLG) who (1) concluded that in an increasingly hostile political environment courts could provide an arena within which they could more successfully advance a progressive social policy agenda; and (2) learning from cross-national experiences, concluded that certain rules and institutional arrengments would create legal opportunities to exploit courts to maximum effect. As interest groups have turned to the courts as a means of advancing their objectives, social movement theorists have expanded the concept of political opportunity structure to include legal opportunities. In recent years, political scientists have paid increasing attention to the conditions under which groups make use of courts in order to advance their interests. Less attention, by contrast, has been paid to the ways in which groups attempt to shape legal opportunity structures as a means of facilitating strategic litigation. This study shows that activist lawyers not only seek to exploit existing legal opportunities and resources, but that they also seek to engineer new ones. Existing analyses of the RED have focused on the timing of the Directive's adoption and on the role of the SLG experts in lobbying for it. The substantive content of Directive has been attributed to a process of borrowing from preexisting European directives concerning gender equity. This study subjects the substance of the RED to further study. It demonstrates that the Directive prescribes a number of national-level reforms that can facilitate strategic litigation as a means of advancing egalitarian and pluralistic goals. It argues that the SLG devised these types of provisions and persistently lobbied for them throughout the European policymaking process in order to create new legal opportunities that could be exploited in pursuit of its broader goals. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British press is known for its open political partisanship. Readers of different national newspapers are likely to receive significantly different versions of daily political news. This paper examines the various ways in which "human rights lawyers" are depicted by two newspapers with opposing editorial stances on the value of the Human Rights Act 1998, which significantly widened the scope for human rights litigation in British courts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do networks structure policy-event participation in forums where laws are made? To address this question, this paper investigates patterns of joint participation in cases before the Supreme Court of the United States among pairs of notable conservative lawyers. Using a sample of 26 prominent lawyers working for non-profit conservative organizations, we employ network regression models to examine the determinants of joint participation in legal cases before the Supreme Court. We test several explanations for similarity in political behavior, including shared issue interests, joint activation in prior litigation, shared organizational affiliations, and structural equivalence in communication networks. Results show that two factors - joint activation in prior litigation and structural equivalence - are associated with isomorphic patterns of political behavior. These findings indicate that political activation before the Supreme Court reflects shared interests in specific legal issues as well as structural positions in a political community. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]