John P. Heinz

Over the past several decades, the number of lawyers in large cities has doubled, women have entered the bar at an unprecedented rate, and the scale of firms has greatly expanded. This immense growth has transformed the nature and social structure of the legal profession. In the most comprehensive analysis of the urban bar to date, Urban Lawyers presents a compelling portrait of how these changes continue to shape the field of law today. Drawing on extensive interviews with Chicago lawyers, the authors demonstrate how developments in the profession have affected virtually every aspect of the work and careers of urban lawyers - their relationships with clients, job tenure and satisfaction, income, social and political values, networks of professional connections, and patterns of participation in the broader community. Yet despite the dramatic changes, much remains the same. Stratification of income and power based on gender, race, and religious background, for instance, still maintains inequality within the bar. The authors of Urban Lawyers conclude that organizational priorities will likely determine the future direction of the legal profession. And with this landmark study as their guide, readers will be able to make their own informed predictions.

Critics of the policy-making process argue that private interest groups exert too much influence on the decisions of government, but only rarely has this proposition been examined systematically. The Hollow Core draws on interviews with more than 300 interest groups, 800 lobbyists, and 300 government officials to assess the efforts of private organizations to influence federal policy in four areas—agriculture, energy, health, and labor policy.

The legal profession has grown immensely in size, diversity, and influence but some lawyers clearly have more influence than others. What determines the systematic allocation of status, power and economic reward among lawyers? What kind of social structure organizes lawyers' roles in the bar and in the larger community? As John P. Heinz and Edward O. Laumann demonstrate, the legal profession is stratified primarily by the character of the clients served, not by the type of legal service rendered. Using data from extensive personal interviews with nearly 800 Chicago lawyers, the authors show that lawyers who serve one type of client seldom serve the other. Furthermore, lawyers' political, ethno-religious and social ties are very likely to correspond to those of their clients, and the distribution of prestige among lawyers reflects the dichotomy of client types. This volume raises questions about law and the nature of professionalism, questions addressed in the provocative and far-ranging final chapter. This work was originally published in 1983 and has been substantially revised to better serve students and laypersons alike. It offers a sophisticated and comprehensive analysis of lawyers' professional lives.