Ann Southworth

Lawyers for Conservative Causes: Clients, Ideology, and Social Distance

Scholars have devoted attention to cause lawyers on the political left, but lawyers who work on the conservative side of the American political spectrum have received relatively little academic consideration. This article presents systematic data on the characteristics of and relationships among lawyers affiliated with organizations active on a selected set of 17 conservative issues. We find that the lawyers serve several separate and distinct constituencies-business conservatives, Christian conservatives, libertarians, abortion opponents-and that the credentials of the lawyers serving these varying constituencies differ significantly. The greatest degree of social separation occurs between the business constituency and the abortion opponents, with another clear separation between libertarians and the interest groups devoted to traditional family values and order maintenance. The divisions among these constituencies appear to reflect the difference between insider politics and populism, which is manifested in part in actual geographic separation between lawyers located in the District of Columbia and those in the South, West, and Midwest. In the center of the network, however, we find some potential mediators-prominent lawyers who may facilitate communication and coordination among the several constituencies. These lawyers and the organizations they serve attempt to merge morality, market freedom, and individual liberty concerns, and they convene meetings of diverse sets of lawyers and organizational leaders to seek consensus on policy goals. Nonetheless, the findings indicate that most organizations are seldom active on issues that lie beyond the relatively narrow boundaries of their own interests.

Some Realism About Realism in Teaching About the Legal Profession

UC Irvine Law School has adopted a first-year course designed to introduce students to the rich empirical literature on the legal profession and to give them an understanding of practice realities and critical perspectives on those practices. It also seeks to provide students with information about the social and cultural contexts of law practice that they will find useful as they navigate their careers. This chapter describes and assesses the course and our experience while teaching it.