Business Lawyers and Value Creation for Clients

This Symposium marks an important milestone in legal scholarship and education: The spotlight falls on business lawyers for a change. Ten years ago, when one of us first wrote about what business lawyers really do, no one had devoted much attention to this part of the profession. In his broadside against lawyers, Derek Bok, then President of Harvard University and formerly dean of its law school, reserved his invective for litigators and the litigation process. Business lawyers captured the attention of very few critics; even on the unusual occasion when we were noticed, the criticism was at least funny. If the litigators got Shakespeare\u27s incitement to legacide, we got Kurt Vonnegut. Some of you may remember Vonnegut\u27s primer on the lawyer as transaction cost engineer, in which a popular law professor tells his students that to get ahead in the practice of law a lawyer should be looking for situations where large amounts of money are about to change hands. Give Vonnegut credit he saw the central importance of a transactional focus only a few years after Coase. Vonnegut goes on: In every big transaction [the professor said], there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on. If the man who is to receive the treasure is unused to wealth, has an inferiority complex and shapeless feelings of guilt, as most people do, the lawyer can often take as much as half the bundle, and still receive the recipient\u27s blubbering thanks

Disputing through Agents: Cooperation and Conflict between Lawyers in Litigation

Do lawyers facilitate dispute resolution or do they instead exacerbate conflict and pose a barrier to the efficient resolution of disputes? A distinctive characteristic of our formal mechanisms of conflict resolution is that clients carry on their disputes through lawyers. Yet, at a time when the role of lawyers in dispute resolution has captured not only public but political attention, social scientists have remained largely uninterested in the influence of lawyers on the disputing process. This is not to say that academics have ignored the growth in civil litigation in the United States. Economists have developed an extensive literature that models one or another aspect of the litigation and settlement process. But the economic literature, with rare exceptions, shares a troublesome feature. Almost by convention, litigation is modeled as a two-person game between principals, thereby abstracting away the legal system's central institutional characteristic-litigation is carried out by agents

The Self-Administered Witness Interview Tool (SAW-IT): Enhancing witness recall of workplace incidents

Given the often crucial role of witness evidence in Occupational Health and Safety investigation, statements should be obtained as soon as possible after an incident using best practice methods. The present research systematically tested the efficacy of a novel Self-Administered Witness Interview Tool (SAW-IT); an adapted version of the Self-Administered Interview (SAI©) designed to elicit comprehensive information from witnesses to industrial events. The present study also examined whether completing the SAW-IT mitigated the effect of schematic processing on witness recall. Results indicate that the SAW-IT elicited significantly more correct details, as well as more precise information than a traditional incident report form. Neither the traditional report from, nor the SAW-IT mitigated against biasing effects of contextual information about a worker’s safety history, confirming that witnesses should be shielded from extraneous post-event information prior to reporting. Importantly, these results demonstrate that the SAW-IT can enhance the quality of witness reports

A previously unexplored encounter: the English judiciary, carte de visite and photography as a form of mass media

Studies exploring the link between the representation of judges, photography and mass media tend to focus on the appearance of cameras in courtrooms and the reproduction of the resulting photographs in the press at the beginning of the 20th century. But more than 50 years separates these developments from the birth of photography, in the late 1830’s. This study examines a previously unexplored encounter between the English judiciary and photography that began in the 1860’s. The pictures where known as ‘carte de visite’. They were the first type of photographic image capable of being mass produced. It’s a form of photography that for a period of almost 20 years attracted a frenzy of interest. Drawing upon a number of archives, including the library of Lincoln’s Inn, London’s National Portrait Gallery and my own personal collection this article has two objectives. The first is to examine the carte portraits of senior members of the judiciary that were produced during that time. What appears within the frame of this new form of portraiture? Of particular interest is the impact the chemical and technological developments that come together in carte photographs had on what appears within the frame of judicial portraits. The second objective is to examine the manner in which they were displayed. This engages a commonplace of scholarship on portraiture; the location and mode of display shape the meaning of what lies within the frame of the picture. Carte portraits were produced with a particular display in mind: the album. They were to be viewed not in isolation but as part of an assemblage of portraits. Few albums survive. Those that do offer a rare opportunity to examine the way carte portraits of judges were used and the meanings they generated through their display. Three albums containing carte portraits of judges will be considered

Telling stories about European Union Health Law: The emergence of a new field of law

The ideational narrative power of law has now solidified, and continues to solidify, ‘European Union health law’, into an entity with a distinctive legal identity. EU health law was previously seen as either non-existent, or so broad as to be meaningless, or as existing only in relations between EU law and health (the ‘and’ approach), or as consisting of a body of barely or loosely connected policy domains (the ‘patchwork’ approach). The process of bringing EU health law into being is a process of narration. The ways in which EU health law is narrated (and continues to be narrated) involve three main groups of actors: the legislature, courts and the academy