Poor Peoples Lawyers In Transition

The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.

Established in 1964, the federal Legal Services Program (later, Corporation) served a vast group of Americans desperately in need of legal counsel: the poor. In Rationing Justice, Kris Shepard looks at this pioneering program's effect on the Deep South, as the poor made tangible gains in cases involving federal, state, and local social programs, low-income housing, consumer rights, domestic relations, and civil rights. While poverty lawyers, Shepard reveals, did not by themselves create a legal revolution in the South, they did force southern politicians, policy makers, businessmen, and law enforcement officials to recognize that they could not ignore the legal rights of low-income citizens. Having survived for four decades, America's legal services program has adapted to ever-changing political realities, including slashed budgets and severe restrictions on poverty law practice adopted by the Republican-led Congress of the mid-1990s. With its account of the relationship between poverty lawyers and their clients, and their interaction with legal, political, and social structures, Rationing Justice speaks poignantly to the possibility of justice for all in America.

This collection provides an innovative and engaging way of assessing the development of legal profession scholarship and its potential future development by presenting an analysis of the ‘leading works’ of the discipline. The book was written by prominent and emerging international scholars in the field, with each contributor having been invited to select and analyse a work which has for them shed light on what the legal profession is and what it does. The chapters explore the effect that the chosen work has had upon legal profession scholarship as a whole, both within particular jurisdictions and internationally. Contributors also reflect upon the likely implications of the leading work on the future study of and application to the legal profession. They relate the works to recent and contemporary developments in law and access to justice, such as the rise of technology, impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, and issues of funding, to highlight the interpretative value of such scholarship. Presenting an overview and introduction to the field of legal profession research, the collection will be required reading for researchers looking to study any aspect of the legal profession. It will also prove compelling for a wide variety of access to justice and justice system research projects. The book will also appeal to scholars interested in legal ethics.

This book focuses on the history of the provision of legal aid and legal assistance to the poor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in eight different countries. It is the first such book to bring together historical work on legal aid in a comparative perspective, and allows readers to analogise and contrast historical narratives about free legal aid across countries. Legal aid developed as a result of industrialisation, urbanization, immigration, the rise of philanthropy, and what were viewed as new legal problems. Closely related, was the growing professionalisation of lawyers and the question of what duties lawyers owed society to perform free work. Yet, legal aid providers in many countries included lay women and men, leading at times to tensions with the bar. Furthermore, legal aid often became deeply politicized, creating dramatic conflicts concerning the rights of the poor to have equal access to justice.