Deborah L.Rhode, The Trouble With Lawyers, Oxford University Press, 2015, vii + 234 pp, hb, £19.99. Benjamin H.Barton, Glass Half Full: The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession, Oxford University Press, 2015, v + 305 pp, hb, £19.99.
| Published date | 01 March 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12187 |
| Author | Magdalene D'Silva |
| Date | 01 March 2016 |
Reviews
to the advantage of those clients who seek prospective knowledge and advice
rather than waiting until things go wrong. If it is sensible to enter pre-marital
and cohabitation ‘contracts’ concerning the adult relationship, people should
certainly be informed, via the vicarious knowledge of their advisers, about
the legalities of any children they may be considering. Whilst the book’s own
legal input does not match its sociological content, it is correspondingly un-
pretentious in that regard. The lawyer-reader can fill the gap herself, but this
admirable book would have done even better for others had it supplied that
vital context as comprehensively as it does the rest.
Chris Barton∗
Deborah L. Rhode,The Trouble With Lawyers, Oxford University Press, 2015,
vii +234 pp, hb,£19.99. BenjaminH. Barton,Glass Half Full: The Decline and
Rebirth of the Legal Profession, Oxford University Press, 2015, v +305 pp,
hb, £19.99.
The Trouble With Lawyers by Deborah Rhode and Glass Half Full: The Decline and
Rebirth of the Legal Profession by Benjamin Barton are two honest, well researched
accounts of the spectre of decreasing public access to justice that is resulting,
inter alia, from an unsustainably increasing number of lawschools, law students,
and lawyers in the United States. Both books follow other respected works on
these issues, including B. Tamanaha, Failing Law Schools (CUP, 2012); S. Harper,
The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis (Basic Books, 2013); J. Moliterno, The
American Legal Profession in Crisis: Resistance and Responses to Change (OUP,
2013). Rhode and Barton have each been fearlessly frank about the ethical
challenges that they, their law faculty colleagues, and the US legal profession
face. Both authors also put into context the threat of technology disruption
to legal services (which confronts all professions, not just lawyers: R. Susskind
and D. Susskind, The Future of the Professions (OUP, 2015)) by clarifying that
the way technology is changing some legal services is by potentially replacing
lawyers entirely.
Although Barton’s book analogises lawyers to those depicted by Charles
Dickens in his novel Bleak House, a joint review of both books invites a com-
parison that is closer to the lawyer characters portrayed in Dickens’ ATaleof
Two Cities: Sydney Carton, the junior barrister who lacks self-worth and does
all the legal work which his senior, Mr Stryver, then presents and takes credit
for as his own. This review of both books might thus be translated into ‘A Tale
of Two Legal Professions’, which is the scene that effectively emerges from
Rhode’s and Barton’s analyses of the US legal profession. A clear, arguably
dysfunctional competitive divide is emerging between those who work for Big
Law (large commercial law firms) and everyoneelse. This dysfunction is causing
less public access to justice, not more, which challenges assumptions bynon-law
∗Emeritus Professor of Family Law, Staffordshire University.
C2016The Author s. The Modern Law Review C2016 The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2016) 79(2) MLR 364–379371
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