Blackwell Reference Online

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Until the 1970s, American sociolegal research on the legal profession was in the grip of a functionalist framework, which assumed that professions arose organically to address the problem of order in modern society (Durkheim, 1957; Parsons, 1954). According to functionalist accounts, the role of professions was to mediate between individual interests, on the one hand, and state institutions, on the other. Presupposing this view, sociolegal studies of lawyers typically focused on whether lawyers complied with accepted professional norms, which presumably articulated the appropriate role of lawyers in modern society, without questioning the genesis, function, or legitimacy of the norms themselves. Thus some studies examined whether lawyers served as independent counselors, whose function was to mediate between clients' interests and societal values (Smigel, 1964), or as zealous partisans, whose job within the adversary system was to advocate single-mindedly on behalf of clients (Blumberg, 1967; Macaulay, 1979). Other studies investigated the underlying bases for lawyers' failures to adhere to codes of ethics, which supposedly reflected the norms governing lawyers' roles (Carlin, 1966; Handler, 1967). In focusing on the divergence between the profession's normative expectations and the realities of everyday practice, this early sociolegal scholarship engaged in its own variation of ... log in or subscribe to read full text