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Ethics

: Legal Ethics Forum

Georgetown conference on "Empirical Research on the Legal Profession" (and my thoughts about the "growing conjunction" between empirical legal studies and the practice of law)

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Details here. The line-up is excellent and the interplay between practitioners and academics will be intense, insightful, and informative for everyone. Mitt Regan, Jeff Baumann., and Carole Silver are heading up the conference.

Btw, over the last five years we've seen an explosion of articles, studies and analyses from the legal academic community in a vein that challenges Judge Harry Edwards's famous complaint of a "Growing Disjunction between Legal Education and the Legal Profession." Harvard, Georgetown, Indiana, and now Stanford have formidable centers on the legal profession. The Michigan alumni data set and the "After the JD" project have provided reams of data about the profession itself. Policy battles over diversity have increasingly moved away from mere rhetoric and towards hard data -- including the data in Richard Sander's much-bruited articles and the responses to those articles.

When I recently re-read my lecture notes from ten years ago on the structures and demographics of private practice, I was shocked at how elementary the topics were. Today's students, and today's law firms, have a far better empirical grasp of the profession. So here's a tip of the cap for the academics who are creating this "growing conjunction."

Full post as published by Legal Ethics Forum on January 28, 2009 (boomark / email).