Robert Eli Rosen

Liberal battle zones and the study of law and the media: A legal academic’s afterword.

One approach to the study of law and the media is to assume that autonomy of law and legal decisions from media influence is desirable. Reviewing the other articles in this special issue, this Afterword examines the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. Its strength is in the battle zones for liberal values; it contributes to fights against bias and prejudice. Its weakness stems from subjectivitys contributions to justice; it does not explore the necessity and desirability of a legal system embedded in culture. The Afterword suggests areas for research on the interdependencies between law and culture that can complement the research reported in this special issue.

Rejecting the culture of independence: Corporate lawyers as committed to their clients

This chapter proposes that corporate lawyers be studied as committed to their clients, asking how they advance exercises of power by those whom they have chosen to represent. Currently, corporate lawyers are studied as independent from their clients, asking how they resist client demands. Such research continues despite repeated findings that corporate lawyers are not independent. This chapter explains the puzzling persistence of independence by cultural understandings of both professionalism and law. It recovers a submerged historic voice in which corporate lawyers are judged by their position in a network of relations. It argues that it was the organization of the corporate law firm as a factory which allowed it to become a professional ideal. Market competition has led corporate law firms to move away from a factory model to one in which commitment to clients, not independence from them, is the organizing principle.

Educating Law Students to Be Business Leaders

What skills does legal education provide that can enable graduates to succeed in careers outside of law? What coursework is relevant outside legal practice? How can law graduates market themselves to succeed in business? This article seeks to being answering these questions. Events within the legal marketplace make the questions that it raises ever more pressing.This article is based on a survey conducted with major corporate executives who possessed as their only graduate degree a J.D. They were asked how their legal education prepared them to be business executives. They were asked to suggest how legal education ought to be reoriented to be of more use to graduates whose careers would take them into corporate management.General Counsel and members of corporate legal departments were excluded from this survey. Half of the respondents who now work as business executives had spent a portion of their careers in legal practice. Factor analysis is used to explicate the skills the respondents report law students need to develop for success in business.

The sociological imagination and legal ethics

ABSTRACT For ten years, General Motors (GM) denied that an ignition switch that could easily be turned to ‘Off’ constituted a safety defect. Accidents, deaths and injuries resulted. Despite many, many suits against GM, the problem remained uncorrected. The explanations that have been proffered are interrogated in this article and others are suggested. It concludes that a bureaucratic legal department is partly to blame, and criticises how the legal department evaluated cases by their settlement value. It criticises GM’s culture of blaming drivers for accidents. It concludes that the main problem at GM was not bureaucracy, but poor organisation of team management. GM was not organised for accountability without hierarchy. The article suggests that lawyers can play a key role in improving corporate decision making.

In-House Counsel

In-house counsel refers to professionally trained employees working for an organizations law department. They may not be the only legally trained individuals working for the organization, nor the only employees responsible for the legal work of the organization. They are defined by working in a legal department and reporting to a chief legal officer/general counsel. Sociological research on in-house counsel has focused on in-house counsel being both organizational and professional actors.

All Fact is Beautiful Theory: The Romantic Philip Selznick

Abstract Properly understood, Philip Selznick is a chastened romantic of the Left and is mischaracterized as a man of the Right. To Marx, Selznick added insights derived form Freud and Dewey. He was committed to the moral primacy of facts and the conditions under which they realized values. Selznick’s organicism is discussed and critiqued.