Inserting professionals and professional organizations in studies of wrongdoing : the nature, antecedents and consequences of professional misconduct

Professional misconduct has become seemingly ubiquitous in recent decades. However, to date there has been little sustained effort to theorize the phenomenon of professional misconduct, how this relates to professional organizations, and how this may contribute to broader patterns of corruption and wrongdoing. In response to this gap, in this contribution we discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of analyses that focus on the nature, antecedents and consequences of professional misconduct. In particular, we discuss how the nature of professional misconduct can be quite variegated and nuanced, how boundaries between and within professions can be either too weak or too strong and lead to professional misconduct, and how the consequences of professional misconduct can be less straightforward than normally assumed. We also illuminate how some important questions about professional misconduct are still pending, including: how we define its different organizational forms; how it is instigated by the changing nature of professional boundaries; and how its consequences are responded to in professional organizations and society more widely

Critical Essay: Inserting professionals and professional organizations in studies of wrongdoing:The nature, antecedents, and consequences of professional misconduct.

Professional misconduct has become seemingly ubiquitous in recent decades. However, to date there has been little sustained effort to theorize the phenomenon of professional misconduct, how this relates to professional organizations, and how this may contribute to broader patterns of corruption and wrongdoing. In response to this gap, in this contribution we discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of analyses that focus on the nature, antecedents and consequences of professional misconduct. In particular, we discuss how the nature of professional misconduct can be quite variegated and nuanced, how boundaries between and within professions can be either too weak or too strong and lead to professional misconduct, and how the consequence of professional misconduct can be less straightforward than normally assumed. We also illuminate how some important questions about professional misconduct are still pending, including: how we define its different organizational forms; how it is instigated by the changing nature of professional boundaries; and how its consequences are responded to in professional organizations and society more widely

Changing practices: The specialised domestic violence court process

Specialised domestic violence courts, initially developed in the United States of America, have been recognised by other jurisdictions including Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. This article presents a case study of K Court in Toronto, drawing upon documentary evidence, direct observations and interviews with key informants. It is argued that the specialised domestic violence court process includes changing practices of some of the key stakeholders. Learning lessons from abroad can offer jurisdictions insights that can steer implementation of appropriate practices in the field

Moving up or moving out, social capital and migration in lawyers' lives

grantor: University of TorontoThis study draws on a unique sample of Canadian lawyers and law school graduates who moved from Quebec to Ontario. This migration flow has been prominent in recent years, and is embedded in the political and economic relationship between Quebec and English Canada. I focus on these respondents to explore the interplay between politics and the life course in the legal profession. These respondents are in a unique situation since their move straddles questions of community, social capital, and socio-political changes; this presents an opportunity to enrich scholarship on the legal profession by combining an understanding of the politics of lawyers with a focus on life course outcomes. In so doing, the concept of "social capital" is most helpful in providing a lens through which to approach this migration flow, linking together questions of community with later life outcomes. This dissertation canvasses an array of effects regarding this move. I first explore the decision of these respondents to move from Quebec to Ontario, investigating the growth of migrant networks and social capital over time. I then turn my attention to the migration experience of Jewish migrants, who comprised a large portion of this study's respondents; in so doing, I explore the positive role that social capital played in their migration experience, and contextualize their move within a broader paradigm of loyalty, voice, and exit. Having explored the decision to migrate and the migration experience, I then focus on the professional lives of these lawyers, and the effects of social capital on their professional outcomes. I approach this question in two ways: first, I focus on sole practitioners, and combine a Marxian class analysis with Bourdieu's emphasis on social capital. Second, I compare these migrants with a sample of Ontario lawyers who had not moved following their law school education, and bring together an analysis of migration with later professional outcomes. The concluding section presents the implications of these findings for future studies of the legal profession, and how a focus on "social capital" can provide both the particularity and the generality needed to capture diverse experiences and their effects on lawyers' lives.Ph.D

Urban Law School Graduates in Large Law Firms

Two major trends have dominated the American legal profession in recent years. First, the legal profession has seen a striking growth in the largest firms during the latter part of the last century. In 1960, Shearman Sterling & Wright (now called Shearman & Sterling) was the largest firm in the country - and therefore the world. It had 125 lawyers. By the close of the century, there were more than 250 firms larger than Shearman & Sterling had been forty years before, with the largest ten topping the scales at 1000 lawyers or more. Today, in order to make the top 25 firms must have at least 175 lawyers, and the median size is well over 500. Moreover, these mega-firms (to use a now antiquated sounding phrase that scholars once used to refer to what they then regarded as new and rare entrants on the professional scene) can now be found in virtually every major city in the country and many minor ones as well. The second trend has been the growth of the profession itself. The U.S. legal profession doubled in size from 1960 to 1985 - and nearly doubled again between 1985 and 2000. For the most part, this growth has not been fueled by an increase in the number of law students graduating from the country\u27s oldest and most prestigious law schools. With few exceptions, the enrollment of these schools has remained remarkably constant during this period - at least with respect to their J.D. programs. Instead, growth has primarily come from the creation of new law schools and expanded enrollment in schools located outside of the top tier as measured by U.S. News and World Report. In this paper, we analyze one important group of lawyers who reside at the intersection of these two trends: graduates of urban law schools, by which we mean schools located in major urban areas that are ranked outside of the top tier, who are working in large law firms. During the so-called Golden Age of the 1960s, graduates from urban law schools had virtually no chance of being hired by elite law firms. But the tremendous growth in both the number and absolute size of large law firms during the last decades of the twentieth century - combined with the relative stability in the size of the graduating classes at most elite law schools - has meant that there are simply not enough of these prized recruits to fill the hiring needs of the nation\u27s top law firms. Although firms have responded to this labor crunch by reaching deeper into the class at the schools from which they have traditionally recruited, they have also significantly expanded the number and diversity of law schools from which they hire. In the pages that follow, we investigate how these changing recruiting patterns are affecting the careers of the graduates of urban law schools - and, in turn, what the careers of these graduates can tell us about the continuing significance of the status hierarchies that defined large law firms during the Golden Age