Craig A. McEwen

Divorce lawyers at work : varieties of professionalism in practice

The authors look at how divorce lawyers actually work to address the question of legal professionalism in practice. Through a detailed and systematic study of legal practice at the micro level, they show how lawyers create their own controls over work through their social relationships, formal and informal norms, common knowledge, and shared values. While much of the research on legal professionalism centers on the formal standards of the bar as reflected in codes of professional responsibility, Mather et al. show how the discretionary judgments that lawyers make, and the choices they face, are actually understood in relation to norms and standards of other lawyers with whom they interact or compare themselves.

Response to Jerome Kagan's Essay on Stress (2016).

To be useful, the concept of stress needs to be defined in biological terms linked to a broader framework of allostasis and its role in the adaptation of brain and body to positive and negative life experiences. A clear biological framework helps connect and organize animal and human research on stress. In particular, the concepts of “toxic stress” and “allostatic load and overload” highlight those experiences and situations that, as Kagan says, “compromise an organism’s health and capacity to cope with daily challenges” (p. 442). A deeper understanding is needed of the epigenetic influences throughout the life course that contribute both to these negative outcomes and to positive ones.

Competence and Quality

The Test Design Project does the unthinkable. It translates SPIDRs rhetorical commitment l to competency-based examination of mediator sk~ls into practice. In doing so, it understandably makes many people nervous. For example, I worry that such testing could promote a single style of mediation when a diversity o f approaches should be encouraged, and I am tmeasy that we will confuse mediator competency with quality of mediation. At the same time, however, I also believe that mediators should be competent and held accountable for their work. Knowing that professional groups often transform self-policing into the creation of entry barriers that protect incompetence and limit competition, I admire both SPIDRs endorsement of performance-based tests rather than educational credentials and the aspirations of the Test Design Project. I believe that if we can claim to know good (or bad) mediation when we see it, then we should identify and articulate the criteria by which we make such judgments. Thus, I sympathize with the Project while worrying about where it might lead.