A timely warning is given by Olson, who maintains that today's class-action lawyers are fast carving out a new and dangerous role as an unelected fourth branch of the government.

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.

First published in 2011. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

William Simon, a legal theorist with experience in practice, here argues that the profession's standard approach to questions of legal ethics is incoherent and implausible, insisting the critical weakness is the style of judgment.

"Like the popular earlier editions, the fourth edition of A Lawyer Writes puts the reader in the place of a first-year attorney faced with real-life assignments. In doing so, it teaches law students not only how to succeed in law school, but also how to succeed in the practice of law. Using graphics and visual samples that demonstrate both effective and ineffective analytical techniques, this updated edition illustrates best practices for objective legal analysis and provides an overview of the transition from objective to persuasive writing. The content and examples in the fourth edition have been supplemented, updated, and reorganized to provide an easy-to-use, step-by-step approach for learning legal analysis and objective writing. A Lawyer Writes aims to provide clear and concrete instruction about each facet of legal analysis, using the same order students will follow when performing the tasks in legal practice. The textbook also provides the relevant theory and background behind the choices attorneys make in their legal writing, enabling students to transfer those techniques to future settings. Speaking to its readers in a straightforward manner, A Lawyer Writes communicates essential skills and theories students can use throughout a lifetime of legal practice"--

The very presence of women in the law—normal as it may seem to us today—signals revolutionary change in a social order that for centuries entrusted control over its rules to men. Mona Harrington examines both the problems women meet when they claim equal authority as rule makers, and the impact of new perspectives and issues that women bring with them into the profession. On the basis of more than one hundred interviews with women lawyers, judges, law school professors, and law students, and through the stories of their daily experiences, Harrington pinpoints and analyzes the key factors holding women back in a profession still dominated by males—among them the “men’s club” ambience, the focus on billable hours, sexual harassment and the inequality it perpetuates, lingering unequal division of labor at home, and hostile media images of women in positions of power. She shows us what life is like for women lawyers in practice today and how their dilemmas reflect the social issues of our time. She gives us the voices of women who have adapted to the cultural codes of corporate law and women who have broken them; women who have successfully balanced their professional and private lives and women who feel trapped by the combination of long hours at the office and full responsibility at home. She introduces us to women in new and alternative firms, on the faculties of small public law schools, in in-house legal departments, in prosecutors’ offices and courtrooms—women who are devising new rules and legal theories to bring about change. Women Lawyers is must reading for every woman in the midst of—or contemplating—a career in the law, and for the men who work with them.

Mary Ann Glendon's A Nation Under Lawyers is a guided tour through the maze of the late-twentieth-century legal world. Glendon depicts the legal profession as a system in turbulence, where a variety of beliefs and ideals are vying for dominance.