Immigrant Lawyers and the Changing Face of the U.S. Legal Profession

In this Comment, I extend Lazarus-Black and Globokar\u27s analysis further downstream to consider the stakes for the U.S. legal profession as a whole. Gatekeepers to LL.M. programs are doing far more than determining individual fates and collectively shaping the future of U.S. legal education. I will demonstrate in this Comment that their work helps shape-in concrete, measurable ways-the demographic composition of the U.S. legal profession. In so doing, I will contribute to the emerging field of legal demography, which refers to the study of lawyers through the analysis of data not collected for this specific purpose

Decoupling

Anyone interested in courts, judicial decision-making, family law, gender violence, and the limits and possibilities of the globalization of law will want to read this book about women's struggles to divorce in China's court system. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core

Immigrant Lawyers and the Changing Face of the U.S. Legal Profession

In this Comment, I extend Lazarus-Black and Globokar\u27s analysis further downstream to consider the stakes for the U.S. legal profession as a whole. Gatekeepers to LL.M. programs are doing far more than determining individual fates and collectively shaping the future of U.S. legal education. I will demonstrate in this Comment that their work helps shape-in concrete, measurable ways-the demographic composition of the U.S. legal profession. In so doing, I will contribute to the emerging field of legal demography, which refers to the study of lawyers through the analysis of data not collected for this specific purpose

Women in the Legal Profession, 1970-2010: A Study of the Global Supply of Lawyers

This article represents the first effort to measure the changing global supply and composition of lawyers over a period of several decades. In it I assemble data on lawyer populations and gender compositions from eighty-six countries and use them to calculate estimates for the rest of the world in order to paint a truly global picture of the changing supply of lawyers in general and of female lawyers in particular. Most of the data supporting my analyses come from a unique and hitherto untapped source: individual-level census data. Results reveal a clear sequence in the global process of lawyer feminization. Bar expansion beyond a critical threshold almost always precedes-and is thus a general precondition of-the attainment of a critical threshold of lawyer feminization. More specifically, almost no country\u27s legal profession has attained a feminization level of at least 30 percent of women before its lawyer density surpassed a level of 2,000 people per lawyer. According to estimates, although almost one-half of all the world\u27s countries (containing almost 30 percent of the world\u27s population) have crossed both thresholds, almost 30 percent of all countries (containing 55 percent of the world\u27s population) remain in contexts that have crossed neither. From a global perspective, therefore, the process of lawyer feminization has hardly begun. I conclude this article by discussing an important implication of this pattern. The growing global supply of lawyers has enhanced access to legal services for both men and women. However, because the production of female lawyers has been faster than the production of male lawyers, and to the extent that female lawyers are more likely than their male counterparts to represent female clients, the growing supply of lawyers has probably improved women\u27s access to lawyers more than it has improved men\u27s access to lawyers. Global growth in the production of lawyers is likely a good thing from the standpoint of both women seeking legal careers and women seeking legal assistance. Women in Legal Practice: Global and Local Perspectives, Symposium, June 5-8, 2012. Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association

Decoupling: Marital Violence and the Struggle to Divorce in China

An analysis of adjudicated divorce decisions in two Chinese provinces reveals the extent to which and the reasons why Chinese courts subvert the global legal norms they symbolically embrace. In China, uncontested no-fault divorces are readily attainable outside the court system. Courts, by contrast, granted divorces in fewer than half of the cases they adjudicated. Despite an abundance of formal legal mechanisms designed to provide relief to victims of marital abuse, a plaintiff’s claim of domestic violence did not increase the probability a court granted a divorce request. Chinese courts’ highly institutionalized practice of denying first-attempt divorce petitions and granting divorces on subsequent litigation attempts disproportionately impacts women and has spawned a sizable population of female marital-violence refugees. These findings carry substantive and theoretical implications concerning the limits and possibilities of the local penetration of global legal norms

Popular attitudes towards dispute processing in urban and rural China

The legal system, defined as lawyers, police, and the courts, is only a very small part of the larger justice system in China. People with grievances rarely turn to lawyers and courts for help. Instead, they exhibit an extraordinary tendency toward ‘self-help’, including dispute avoidance and bilateral negotiation. When they do seek help from third parties, they are far more likely to approach local community leaders and government agencies than lawyers and courts.</p

Village Dispute Mediation in China, 2002–10: An Enduring Institution amid Rural Change

Abstract: The mediation of disputes by community leaders in China has deep historical roots and has long been among the responsibilities of neighbourhoods and villages. While most research on the topic has looked at cities, mediation is in fact more common in the countryside. This paper draws on a survey conducted in 2002 (n=2,164) and repeated in 2010 (n=2,659), covering 23 villages in five provinces, which provides detailed data on conflict from disputants themselves. We examine the evolution of this much-debated mode of conflict resolution and assess its prevalence and effectiveness relative to alternatives. We find that, even as overall rates of disputing declined, seeking intervention by village authorities remained as common a response to disputes in 2010 as it was eight years prior. The paper thus sheds light on a primary means through which the party-state has tried to maintain stability, tamp down strife, and assert its primacy at the community level