Before I end my time with Marc Galanter’s Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture by returning it to the University of Alberta’s Weir Law Library, I want to excerpt a little piece of it for awareness’s sake. Galanter, at least as far as I’m aware, is most well known for his 1974 article titled “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead” (464 KB PDF). That piece, which perhaps deserves its own blog entry some other time, explains how it’s less the actual substance of legal rules and more the way the legal system is set up that determines who truly benefits from the law. In other words, if you’re a lawyer who wants to change the world, you should start by changing your profession.

A lot of Galanter’s scholarship is about the American legal profession—what it really does, what people think of it, and who benefits from it. His introduction to Lowering the Bar is a sweeping summary of much of his work, and has got some damned interesting tidbits in it (like, did you know that until the 1960s the Production Code for American movies declared that “law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed,” or that the number of pages added annually to the Federal Register has gone from 14,477 in 1960 to 53,480 in 1985 (to 78,724 in 2006)?). It is this passage and its endnotes that I wanted to highlight most especially:

[A]fter World War II, courts and legislatures extended legal protections and remedies for more of life’s troubles and problems to more and more people, including those who earlier were largely excluded from it—injured workers and consumers, blacks, women, the disabled, prisoners, and so on. . . . [But d]uring [this] era of expanding responsiveness to victims and outsiders, there was even greater growth in legal activity on behalf of dominant groups: litigation by businesses increased more rapidly than litigation by individuals; legal expenditures by businesses and government increased more rapidly than expenditures by individuals; the large firm sector of the legal profession that provides services for corporations and large organizations grew and prospered more than the small firm sector that services individuals.

In 1967, individuals bought 55 percent of the product of the legal services industry and businesses bought 39 percent. With each subsequent five-year period, the business portion has increased and the share consumed by individuals has declined. By 1992 the share bought by businesses increased to 51 percent and the share bought by individuals dropped to 40 percent. Individuals’ expenditures on legal services increased 261 percent from 1967 to 1992, while law firms’ income from business increased by 555 percent during that period. Even this more than double rate of growth understates the growth of business expenditures on legal services, for it includes only outside lawyers and does not include in-house legal expenditures, which greatly increased during this period.

[It’s] estimated that in 1972 “more than half (53 percent) of the total effort of Chicago’s bar was devoted to the corporate client sector, and a smaller but still substantial proportion (40 percent) is expended on the personal client sector.” When the study was replicated twenty years later, the researchers found that about 51 percent of the total effort of all Chicago lawyers was devoted to the corporate client sector and only 29 percent to the personal/small business sector. . . . To the extent that lawyers serving the corporate sector were able to command more staff and support services with their effort, these figures understate the gap in services delivered.

(In case anyone’s checking, I concatenated excerpts from the main text and the endnotes to put that block quote together.)