Two interesting thoughts on judges have found their way to me lately. First, “do judges systematically favor the interests of the legal profession?” That’s what this article (spotlighted on this fabulous blog) asks. Its answer? Yes. After a sweeping analysis of major cases in the areas of lawyer regulation, attorney-client […]

Yesterday, the Technolawyer mailing list published these comments from a lawyer about how hard it is to make a living in public interest law:
I bristle at the suggestion that I’m not practicing public interest law because I don’t want to “give up [my] lifestyle.” I lived close to the bone as a law student (living […]

A number of courts around the US have begun offering RSS feeds of court opinions and news. So far, the Idaho courts have not (as far as I know). For my own benefit, I’ve used Feed43 to create feeds of the published opinions of the Idaho Supreme Court and Idaho Court of Appeals. […]

Earlier this week, S. 442 (the “John R. Justice Prosecutors and Defenders Incentive Act of 2007″) [GovTrack | OpenCongress | Thomas] made it out of the Judiciary Committee and is bound for the Senate floor. This bill would fund a $25 million federal loan repayment assistance program (LRAP) for new lawyers working in prosecutors’ […]

The other day, I needed some quick stats on the demographics of practicing lawyers. I found some on the ABA’s site (72 KB PDF with the specific data I used), and to visualize them I put together this chart:

Earlier this week, the Legal Services Corporation announced the amounts of this year’s legal aid grants. Idaho Legal Aid Services, Idaho’s lone LSC grantee, will be getting the same number of dollars that it got last year. Curious, I thought I’d pull together this chart showing ILAS’s grant amounts, adjusted for inflation and […]

Today the hyper-enriching Peter Levine writes about “fit” between class and the labor market, noting how it’s not just that wealthy people have more money, but that the way they raise their kids makes those kids better candidates for white collar jobs. This phenomenon is likely most pronounced in the legal profession. If, […]

As I was finishing law school, the dean was in the process of implementing a mandatory pro bono program. Under this program, law students are required to give forty hours of service to an approved legal organization or law firm engaged in some kind of public interest or pro bono publico legal work. […]

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 […]

And to follow upon my plea for more “reality” in the legal profession, here’s a peek into the reality of the legal profession. Xoxohth, aka Autoadmit, is the online gathering place of at least some of America’s incubating lawyers. The foundational understandings there are that

prestigiousness (”prestige”) is next to Godliness;
the third tier (aka […]