Preface Acknowledgments PART I: Introduction The Lawyer and the Heavyweight The Policy Domains Representatives and Their Clients PART II:The Washington Representatives The Organization of Work The Careers of Representatives Ideology, Colleague Networks, and Professional Autonomy PART III: Targets of Representation Contact with Government Institutions The Government officials PART IV: Consensus and Conflict Allies and Adversaries Elite Networks in National Policy Making Participation and Success in Policy Decisions Conclusion Structure and Uncertainty in Private Interest Representation Notes References Index
This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with a major book that influenced the author. Previous contributors include Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol Harlow, Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, André‐Jean Arnaud, Alan Hunt, Michael Adler, and Lawrence O. Gostin.
The political influence of lawyers is a frequent topic of journalism, and Tocqueville is often quoted, but systematic research on lawyers' political roles is sparse. There have, however, been some analyses of lawyers of specific types or within relatively narrow contexts. Studies have examined lawyers active as Washington lobbyists in four policy domains, members of the U.S. Supreme Court bar, and lawyers working for conservative and libertarian organizations in the mid-1990s. The last of those pieces of research found that the networks of relationships among the lawyers and the organizations that they served were divided into segments defined by particular constituencies and that there were substantial differences in the characteristics of lawyers serving differing constituencies. Some lawyers, however, bridged the segments, serving as mediators or brokers. Organizations such as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation sought to build ties within the conservative coalition, but deep cultural differences separated lawyers for social conservatives from those representing other constituencies, making cooperation difficult.
The process of specialization is now well advanced within the legal profession, and the specialties have acquired clearly varying levels of prestige among the practicing bar. What are the characteristics of the specialties, or of the lawyers who practice in them, that might account for these variations in prestige? In describing the prestige differences and several of the variables that might be thought to account for them, the authors analyze the results of a survey of a large random sample of Chicago lawyers. Among the findings are a strong relationship between prestige within the legal profession and the type of clients that the specialty serves, a substantial correlation between prestige and the degree of intellectual challenge presented by the subject matter of the specialty, and the perhaps surprising result that prestige is not significantly associated with the income earned by lawyers practicing in the specialty. The authors conclude that legal specialties that regularly confront personal suffering lose social standing as a result, that prestige within the profession is directly proportional to the degree to which the specialty facilitates the conduct of corporate enterprise, and that the varying prestige of the specialties is likely to affect the political and professional power of the lawyers who practice in them and to influence the patterns of recruitment of lawyers into law practice.
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