Why So Many Lawyers? Are They Good or Bad?

In this essay, Dean Clark examines the popular notion that the United States has too many lawyers and that this abundance burdens the nation. While acknowledging the great growth of law and lawyers in recent decades, Dean Clark argues that, before denouncing this trend, we should first seek to develop a fuller explanation of its causes and consequences. After discussing just what it is that lawyers do, Dean Clark critiques three current "cancerous growth" theories that attempt to explain why there has been such a great and unhealthy increase in the number of lawyers Dean Clark then offers and analyzes four "benign growth" theories-theories based on the assumption that the increasing demand for lawyers'services is an understandable consequence of fundamental social, political, and economic changes. Throughout the essay, Dean Clark indicates areas where additional research may yield a deeper understanding of the forces that shape the roles that lawyers assume in society and the demand for legal services

A dossier driven persistent objects facility

technical reportWe describe the design and implementation of a persistent object storage facility based on a dossier driven approach. Objects are characterized by dossiers which describe both their language defined and "extra-linguistic" properties. These dossiers are generated by a C+-f- preprocessor in concert with an augmented, but completely C++ compatible, class description language. The design places very few burdens on the application programmer and can be used without altering the data member layout of application objects or inheriting from special classes. The storage format is kept simple to allow the use of a variety of data storage backends. Finally, by providing a generic object to byte stream conversion the persistent object facility can also be used in conjunction with an interprocess communication facility to provide object-level communication between processes.

The Real Party in Interest

Ever since the adoption of the original New York Code of i848 it has been a fundamental requirement of code pleading that every action should be prosecuted in the name of the real party in interest, with an exception in favor of an executor or administrator, a trustee of an express trust or a person expressly authorized by statute. The framers of the Code, in explaining the occasion for the provision, referred to the common law prohibition against the assignment of a thing in action and stated this to be the condition of the parties: If the assignee sues at law, he is turned out of court, and if the assignor sues in equity, he is turned out also. They added: The true rule undoubtedly is that which prevails, in the courts of equity, that he who has the right, is the person to pursue the remedy. We have adopted that rule. The provision in question has received comparatively little attention from commentators, but has been the subject of widely diverse opinion in the courts. It is believed that a discussion of the problems raised by it in perhaps its two most striking aspects-assignments of choses in action and subrogation-in relation to its historical background and to its connection with the general purpose of the code may serve to clarify it