Quick Navigation

Seminar on the Legal Profession(s) - Professor Daniel S. Reynolds

The goal of the seminar is for participants to arrive at a broad, historically-grounded understanding of the contemporary American legal profession while becoming individually expert in a narrowly focused question relevant to such an understanding.  The goal is sought by means of lecture and discussion sessions with assigned readings and by means of a serious work of scholarship prepared by each student on a topic of the student’s choosing and presented to the seminar, as a work-in-progress, for its collegial but critical response.

Lecture/discussion sessions (and assigned readings) address broad issues and perspectives on the profession and may included, by way of example only:

  • Methodologies and Perspectives: Toqueville, Marx, Weber
  • The Production of Lawyers: Legal education and other barriers  
  • Formal Organization: The ABA, the development of state and local bars, and the lost ideal of the “unitary” profession  
  • The Professional Monopoly and the development of alternative, competing professions
  • Comparative Legal Professions: the solicitor, the barrister, the bengoshi et al.

Seminar papers bring the discussion sections into sharp focus on a specific problem.  Topics can range widely--from a “biography” of a rural county bar association, for example, to an analysis of the impact of NAFTA and other treaties on transnational delivery of legal services,  to the history and evolution of an issue in adversarial legal ethics.  The criteria for both topic selection and student evaluation is progress toward meeting the seminar goals set out above.  Topics are selected early in the semester through negotiation with me.

In addition to assigned readings, I recommend a book-length treatment of the seminar’s general subject:  Auerbach J., Unequal Justice (1976) which is available at Amazon.com in fairly cheap ‘print-to-order’ editions (under $10). (Auerbach is relentlessly pessimistic but provocative and his book is in serious need of an update but remains one of the very few decent historical overviews of our profession.)