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.

Private Lawyers and the Public Interest: The Evolving Role of Pro Bono in the Legal Profession explores timely questions about the role of pro bono in the legal profession, the relationship between pro bono ideals and pro bono in practice, and the opportunities and limitations of pro bono in expanding access to justice. The contributing writers explore theoretical, empirical, and practical questions regarding the role of pro bono and public service in the legal profession and in law schools. The research presented not only highlights the increase in pro bono efforts across the legal profession but critically examines the limitations of pro bono work, as well as the potential problems such work may pose to the ideal of achieving greater access to justice.

Public Interest Lawyering is the first comprehensive analysis of public interest lawyering that is suitable as a law school elective text and/or advanced legal profession courses and seminars. Drawing upon a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives, this timely textbook examines the lives of public interest lawyers, the clients and causes they serve, the contexts within which they work, the strategies they deploy, and the challenges they face today. Features: The first comprehensive overview of the broad range of contemporary issues faced by public interest lawyers in any American law school text. Thorough discussion of important theoretical issues about the scope and definition of public interest lawyering. Addresses American public interest law from a historical perspective with focus on current issues. Expansive examination of the settings in which public interest practice occurs, including nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and private law firms. Presents the advantages and limits of different legal strategies in public interest practice, including lobbying, public education, community organizing, and community economic development. Addresses contemporary challenges of public interest law in context, including economics and financing, legal ethics, the role of legal education, and the globalization of public interest practice. Discusses critiques of public interest law, including a reflection about the role of lawyers in social movements that addresses contemporary critiques. Ethical obligations of public interest lawyers. Explores special issues related to lawyer-client relations in social change contexts. Extensive coverage of: Models of law reform organizations. Conservative cause lawyering. Government lawyers. The economics of social change lawyering. Global social change lawyering.

The importance and influence of professions in public life has grown increasingly over the twentieth century but the question of whether they subordinate their own self-interests to the public interest has yet to be adequately researched within a major sociological perspective. In Professions and the Public Interest Mike Saks develops a theoretical and methodological framework for assessing professional groups in Western society. The empirical applicability of this framework is demonstrated with particular reference to a novel case study of the response of the medical profession to acupuncture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Professions and the Public Interest will be of great interest to all lecturers and students of social policy, sociology, and medical sociology as well as to professional groups and their members.

These essays, by widely respected scholars in fields ranging from social and political theory to historical sociology and cultural studies, illuminate the significance of the public/private distinction for an increasingly wide range of debates. Commenting on controversies surrounding such issues as abortion rights, identity politics, and the requirements of democratization, many of these essays clarify crucial processes that have shaped the culture and institutions of modern societies. In contexts ranging from friendship, the family, and personal life to nationalism, democratic citizenship, the role of women in social and political life, and the contrasts between western and (post-)Communist societies, this book brings out the ways the various uses of the public/private distinction are simultaneously distinct and interconnected. Public and Private in Thought and Practice will be of interest to students and scholars in disciplines including politics, law, philosophy, history, sociology, and women's studies. Contributors include Jeff Weintraub, Allan Silver, Craig Calhoun, Daniela Gobetti, Jean L. Cohen, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Alan Wolfe, Krishan Kumar, David Brain, Karen Hansen, Marc Garcelon, and Oleg Kharkhordin.

What is public interest law? How effective is it? What are the limits to litigation as a mechanism for conflict resolution? In this study, economists, lawyers, and sociologists evaluate an institutional form that is new to American society and, indeed, to the world--the public interest law (PIL) organization. The book introduces the reader to the structure, resources, and activities of this "nonprofit industry," and also to the factors that affect PIL firms in their choices of cases and methods of handling them. The authors examine PIL's vast range of contemporary public policy concerns. These incude such general topics as the environment, consumerism, housing, employment discrimination, medical care, occupational health and safety, education finance, and taxation. A number of base studies are presented, and a method for economic analysis and evaluation is introduced and applied. The study points to PIL's success in advocating under-represented interests, in winning courtroom decisions, and in translating legal victories into reallocations of resources. At the same time, it notes the bias of PIL towards test-case litigation, a propensity to focus on judicial victories rather than on real social change, and a tendency to use lawyers even when other types of professionals might be more effective. Many of these problems stem from uncertainty of funding and legal restrictions on "nonprofit" organizations. The result is a set of hurdles that distracts PIL firms from their principal goals. The authors do not limit themselves to PIL, but comment on the effectiveness of legal instruments as devices for social change, and on the behavior of the voluntary nonprofit sector, a little-studied portion of the economy. The book presents a fresh approach to the study of both collective-type economic problems and institutional setting in which public interest law works. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.