In the fifteen years since we initiated this comparative sociology of legal professions a great deal of scholarship has appeared. This chapter reviews four major theoretical orientations: market control, competition between professions over knowledge-based jurisdictions, the ideal of professional independence, and economic interpretations. THE CENTRALITY OF THE MARKET In 1980, six years after I began teaching about American lawyers, I was drawn into comparative sociology by an invitation to a conference on the Final Report of the Royal Commission on Legal Services. During the following decade, I continued to address the issues implicated in the title of my contribution to that conference, The Politics of the Market for Legal Services, a paper that was strongly influenced by Magali Sarfatti Larson s historical sociology of a wide range of professions in England and the United States.One of the many paradoxes of market economies is that they drive actors to seek to neutralize competition, even though this is their essential ?energizing force. Only the most desperate recent immigrants to a city or nation and new entrants to the market remain exposed to unrestrained competition. They must accept employment without the support of a union or protective legislation or embark on entrepreneurship that requires neither formally certified skills nor capital investment: peddling, prostitution, gardening, housekeeping, baby-sitting, window washing, house painting, taxi driving. Refuge from the buffeting force of competition can take many forms: controlling a market , becoming a salaried worker for a large employer , securing a patent , making large capital investments . In rare instances the sanctuary is almost perfect: the De Beers diamond cartel, or the numerus clausus of some European notaries. Those who sell services may find these strategies less effective than do those who manufacture products. There are no raw materials to corner, capital investment tends to be low, and, until recently, their intellectual products have been unprotected by law. The first step is to persuade potential consumers that the service is both valuable and too difficult for them to perform. As judges and prominent members of the legislature and executive, they can use state power to grant an exclusive jurisdiction to legal institutions , complicate the task beyond lay competence, and even award themselves a legal monopoly . Having commodified legal services, lawyers must limit the number of producers by prohibiting lay competition and regulating entry to the profession by establishing educational qualifications and economic barriers, requiring apprenticeships and examinations, and by limiting opportunities to practice.This concept of the professional project, adapted from Larson, can lead to several misunderstandings. It does not require deliberation or conspiracy although lawyers and other professionals, in desperation or at unguarded moments, often expose their self-interested motives.tions with professionalism. Some commentators objected that lawyers in declining professions seemed to be doing surprisingly well economically, politically, and socially. I am concerned with the dramatic changes in the structure of legal occupations: the increase in market control from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and its erosion in recent decades.Some of the chapters in the original volumes on the legal profession in other countries adopted the framework I advanced in my chapters on England and the United States and my attempts at synthesis. As early as the seventeenth century, advocates sought to limit their numbers and raise their social status by requiring a written examination in civil law, a thesis written in Latin and defended in Latin before the entire faculty, and a public lesson in Latin to the Court of Sessions. Dismayed by their increasing numbers in the late nineteenth century, Writers to the Signet imposed a 500 entrance fee, a five-year apprenticeship, and the requirement of a liberal education. As late as 1980 the profession added the requirement of a one-year Diploma in Legal Practice, knowing that government would only fund 410 places. Paterson acknowledges that qualification as an advocate is still limited by the requirement of an unremunerated nine months as a devil followed by another nine months without income. Moreover, some of his rebuttals seem insubstantial: Scottish solicitors lack a monopoly over the administration of estates or conveyancing of real property because others can do these tasks without pay! If common law professions are united by the necessity to mediate the relation of their members to the market, civil law professions have experienced a different history in their relations to private employers, the university, the state, and, therefore, the market.those institutions separated from the Church. Indeed, the several categories of law graduates judges and prosecutors, civil servants, corporate employees, advocates, notaries and so on do not see themselves as a single profession and even lack a common name.But although I acknowledge that Larson s framework, developed to analyze the United States and England, is inappropriate for the histories of Continental European legal professions, there is evidence that common and civil law professions are converging as a concomitant of the globalization of the economy. Many of the divisions within civil law professions are disappearing, while the centrality of private practice in common law professions is being eroded by the growth of public and private employment. And civil lawyers have had to adapt some of the traits of common law competitors or risk losing their most lucrative work. Even lawyers in the former communist world, who are doubly removed from common law lawyers by their civil law heritage and state-dominated economy, are exhibiting the struggle for market control. Although Michael Burrage continues to deny the centrality of the market, his observations on the contemporary Russian advokatura resonate well with Larson s theory. Eastern European countries such as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia are witnessing contests between advocates and jurisconsults to service the newly privatized economy. Although Terence Halliday tendentiously titled his book about the Chicago Bar Association Beyond Monopoly, lawyers and other professionals remain deeply concerned about their relation to the market. English solicitors have strenuously fought to retain their monopoly over conveyancing , and, in turn, have challenged the Bar s monopoly of advocacy in the higher courts. More than half a century after the American legal profession erected the present entry barriers, it continues to repel new challenges. The administrators of the bar in the nation s capital became concerned that law graduates were finding easy admittance to the District of Columbia bar through the Pennsylvania bar exam: Those who correctly answered 133 of the 200 multiple-choice questions on the multistate examination gained exemption from ?the essay portion. The District resolved to eliminate this loophole while shaming Pennsylvania into requiring entrants to pass the essay examination as well. About the same time the American Bar Association refused to accredit the Massachusetts School of Law, rejecting the argument that it cut tuition to less than half that of elite law schools used practitioners as adjunct professors and electronic data bases and interlibrary loans to save the large capital investment in law books.The health care industry exhibits even more numerous and intense battles over turf as subordinate occupations challenge the dominance of doctors. In Arizona today, however, nurse practitioners can make their own diagnoses, charging thirty-five dollars a visit, and can write prescriptions; twenty other states also allow nurse practitioners to write prescriptions.S. A 1993 study by the American Nurses Association found that nurse practitioners gave more accurate diagnoses and took more comprehensive medical histories than doctors. The American Medical Association s senior vice president for medical education dismissed these studies as inconclusive because they looked at a limited number of services : We draw our sword and make our line in the sand at nurses practicing independently. Nurses are making inroads elsewhere, especially areas in which doctors apparently have little interest: women s health, service in rural communities, care for urban homeless. Yet the AMA insists that replacing physicians with lesser prepared personnel may increase the medical risk to patients and the ultimate cost of care. Medical association PAC fundraising brochures refer to all competitors as quacks and warn, Don t let reform fowl up health care. Optometrists, psychologists, pharmacists, and physician s assistants seek the right to prescribe medicine. Yet the California Medical Association continues to justify its opposition to increasing nurses responsibility in terms of the extraordinarily large differences in educational requirements. In developing my theoretical framework I argued that the market imperative compels service producers to seek not only to control supply but ?also to stimulate demand. The latter strategy has grown in importance as supply control has eroded with the expansion of university education , movements for gender and race equality, and attacks on restrictive practices. Yet English solicitors, who sneered at American cowboys for advertising and contingent fees, now indulge in the former and flirt with the latter. Law enjoys distinct advantages in creating demand, just as it does in controlling supply. The revolving door between government and private practice allows lawyer regulators to turn around and sell their knowledge of how to evade the law . Fame as an innovator often brings repeat business, as did the first poison pill defense to a corporate takeover and the first successful palimony claim.Yet demand creation has significant drawbacks, which may explain the reluctance of many lawyers to engage in it. What the profession touts as altruism can appear to outsiders as self-interest, especially given the deep public ambivalence toward the act of litigating and the content of many legal rights. Some forms of demand creation also tend to concentrate demand and thus the dependence of producers on corporate consumers or governmental third-party payers . Common law professions display an increasing commitment to creating demand.The profession remains deeply ambivalent about such activity, however. A New York lawyer had to sue his bar association to obtain permission to use client testimonials, which only three other states allow. A decade after their fourteen founders met secretly for the first time, the National Association of Law Firm Marketing Administrators has a thousand members, who compete for the ABA s Dignity in Advertising awards. A personal injury lawyer in Birmingham, Alabama, promoted himself by emblazoning his name on wrist watches, baseball caps, and chairs donated to churches and by offering bumper stickers warning: BACK OFF! He went too far, however, when he sent a twenty-five dollar wreath to the funeral of a nineteen-month-old baby who died when a day-care worker left him in a closed van for four hours. He was suspended for two years. Even the American Trial Lawyers Association, whose 65,000 members have the greatest interest in seeking individual clients, was so embarrassed after several prominent lawyers flew to Bhopal that it passed a resolution condemning lawyers who go, uninvited, to the scene of a disaster and advertise for prospective clients. A District of Columbia lawyer who had rushed to both Bhopal and the DuPont Plaza fire in San Juan responded contemptuously that the ATLA leaders would love to wake up and find they d gone to Harvard and been asked into a partnership at Cravath, Swaine Moore. The California Trial Lawyers Association has sponsored a bill that would significantly restrict television advertising. Parker, who makes extensive use of that medium, complained that those country club lawyers don t like guys like me taking cases from them. Health services providers have been pioneers in stimulating demand, perhaps because the potential rewards are so enormous. Public relations firms, representing 60 percent of Los Angeles doctors and all New York hospitals, ensure that their clients appear in newspapers and on television. A New Orleans urologist sent a Time magazine article about a new prostate cancer test to all his patients with a note proclaiming: We offer this! Doctors ordered tests at laboratories in which they had a financial interest until Medicare refused reimbursement. A General Accounting Office study found that doctors were three to five times more likely to order CAT scans, MRIs, ultrasound, and other diagnostic procedures when they had invested in the firm providing the service.equipment at your fingertips and you operate it yourself, you have complete confidence in the results, and you re more likely to use it.... the real issue for patients is whether they will get the tests they need, not whether they are getting too many. T Medical Inc. has been helping doctors set up home health care companies, promising profits of up to 20,000 a year from referrals for an initial investment of about 3,000. Medicare and Medicaid, however, have stopped reimbursing for physical therapy, radiology, home health services, or hospital services in which the doctor has an interest. Nevertheless, Tokos Medical Corp. Deal program, in which doctors invest in companies leasing its fetal monitoring device and get 15 percent of the payments from patients for whom they prescribe it. Although pharmaceutical companies long have offered doctors incentives to prescribe their products , they now seek to speak directly to consumers. The National Mental Health Association ran a media campaign to increase public awareness about depression, without revealing that it was paid for by Eli Lilly and Co., the makers of Prozac. The Marion Merrill Dow Pollen Forecast Hotline not only gave pollen counts to allergy sufferers but also warned that over-the-counter medicines, unlike its own, could cause drowsiness. CIBAGeigy pushes Actigall for gallstones; only the small print reveals that the expensive pills must be taken twice daily for years and fail to dissolve most gallstones. Upjohn promotes Rogaine for baldness and Seldane for allergies.A wide variety of commentators on the professions have made the market the core of their analyses, focusing on efforts at social closure, endogenous and exogenous influences on supply and demand, and the growing role of the state in subsidizing consumption. Nevertheless, critics of the original volumes of Lawyers in Society have advanced a number of objections to market control theory. Several felt I overemphasized the economics of social closure while neglecting the other dimension of Larson s professional project collective mobility.starting point an attempt to understand American lawyers, who were preoccupied for decades with material improvement, which they pursued through state bar associations. In the summer of 1993 a disgruntled former client went on a rampage in a San Francisco law firm, killing three lawyers, a law student, a legal secretary, a client, two trust company employees, and ultimately himself. The California State Bar president responded with a call for a cease-fire on lawyer jokes, which were nothing more than hate speech. He also advocated heavier penalties for ordinary crimes when the victims were lawyers . Opposition from professional associations to law firms engaging in ancillary practice or lawyers entering multidisciplinary partnerships appears to be motivated less by economic concerns than by the fear of losing status from being subordinated to the much larger, better organized Big Six accounting firms. Mark Osiel and Michael Burrage go much further, insisting that the professional project was exclusively concerned with status and indifferent to money. In a capitalist society, personal impoverishment tends to undermine professional status , and the acquisition of wealth confers its own status . Others have criticized the notion of a project for treating the profession as too monolithic and for obscuring internal tensions. I not only agree but also feel that the identification of professional fractions helps explain the interplay between market control and collective mobility . Ronen Shamir, refining Christine Harrington, has made a convincing argument that upper and lower strata American lawyers displayed very different reactions to the emergence of the regulatory state during the New Deal. Solo practitioners, suffering both falling demand during the Depression and growing numbers as legal education expanded, sought to bar nonlawyers from practicing administrative law. Elite lawyers, who derived more business from regulation, sought to judicialize administrative action to preserve the symbolic integrity of the rule of law. Some personal injury lawyers demand the right to chase ambulances, while their professional organization, ATLA, seeks to distance itself from notorious vulgarity.emerges in Seron s finding that younger lawyers, generalists, and those in the inner city favor advertising, whereas older lawyers, specialists, and suburban practitioners oppose it. II.The most ambitious revision of sociological theories of the professions since we completed our comparative project is Andrew Abbott s emphasis on the relationship between knowledge and jurisdiction. Abbott makes two claims: interprofessional competition for market shares is the central feature of the system of professions; and competition is conducted through the medium of knowledge claims. It directs attention away from the social structural characteristics professions share with other occupations and toward the distinctiveness of what professionals do. Abbott thereby problematized the structural-functional claim that professionals deploy expertise, just as social closure theory problematized the structural-functional claim that self-regulation was necessary and sufficient to ensure quality and altruism. At the end of our three volumes we commended such a redirection, and we welcome the studies that have begun to emerge. Many concern the ways in which lawyers transform client experience and motivation into legal claims and remedies mostly in family disputes, but also in commercial matters and civil litigation generally.Competing claims to knowledge often illuminate fluctuations in the market for legal services: for instance, the rivalry between English solicitors and accountants since the mid-nineteenth century, the success of employed German jurists in retaining their role in banking while being reduced to paralegals in the insurance industry, the efforts of Rechtsanw ilte to retain corporate work, and the campaign by Parisian judges to expand their role in economic disputes. I do have reservations about Abbott s theorization, however. More than twenty years earlier two French sociologists stressed the importance of knowledge in analyzing university hospitals, as did two American lawyers in mapping competition between lawyers and others in the United States and England. As Abbott clearly states, professional jurisdictions tend to be entrenched for lengthy periods, both in law and, to a lesser extent, in public opinion. ?Third, it is very difficult to ascertain what professionals know and how they are using that knowledge. The elusiveness of any independent measure of knowledge tempts the analyst into circularity and tautology the attribution of knowledge to professions that have secured their jurisdictions. Mark Osiel, for instance, asserts that common lawyers enjoy a broader jurisdiction than their civilian counterparts because the former must exercise practical judgment in the absence of code and theory.The theory of social closure insists that professions justify their anti-competitive practices by demonstrating a connection to quality. Because knowledge claims are so hard to test, theorizations based on them can lose their critical edge , lapsing into structural-functional complacency. Lawyers... Sterett maintains it is clear that whether or not practitioners study or use the law, society does expect and take account of some presumed expertise. Halliday ascribes the authority of professional organizations to knowledge mandates. But lawyers may actually speak jabberwocky and claim knowledge that is either factitious or irrelevant. He consistently characterizes professional knowledge as a social construct, offering a nuanced analysis of how knowledge claims are advanced and challenged, succeed and fail. Others have described the role of professional ideology in shaping and defending jurisdictions and the differences between knowledge claimed and deployed by both teachers and practitioners. Perhaps the best antidote to mistaking professional pretensions for proficiency is to look at the knowledge actually deployed.The 4th I.A.C.D.Continuing Education credits for medical professionals CME approved 7.5 hours for physicians, Category I; CEU approved 7.5 hours for Registered Nurses; Certificates issued to all conference attendees. Lectures understandable to the General Public. ?RAYMOND A., M.D., Ph.D., Author of Life After Life, Reflections on Life After Life, The Light Beyond and Reunions.KENNETH RING, Ph.D.BRUCE GOLDBERG, D.D.S., M.S.DONINGA L.D.CLAUDIA JENSEN, M.D.SUSAN STORCH, RN, BSN, M.A.A.The rapid expansion of the global economy is creating new markets for professional services, which offer an excellent opportunity to test theories about knowledge and jurisdiction. Yet for all but the smallest legal professions, transnational practice will remain an esoteric specialization, preoccupying only a small minority of members . Globalization shifts economic activity from within states to their interstices or across their borders, where rules are either absent or new and unclear. The stakes are high: the formation and termination of large enterprises , deal-making, and relations with and among national and transnational states . The principal competitors in this domain are lawyers, accountants, management consultants, and, to a lesser extent, investment bankers.national character of the Big Six, existing ties with multinational corporations , expertise in tax, and a strongly entrepreneurial attitude. American lawyers have the advantages of firm size, a focus on corporate work, and aggressiveness; many, however, lack knowledge of civil law systems and European languages. European lawyers have sought to update their knowledge by forging links with innovative legal academics and acquiring further education in the United States. Competition has forced national legal professions to close ranks against outsiders: French avocats and conseils juridiques finally united some twenty years after a failed attempt in 1971; German Rechtsanw lte defied the ban on multistate partnerships; the distinction between English solicitors and barristers is eroding.But knowledge is not the only terrain of contestation and is often little more than a rationalization. National legal professions have resorted to a wide variety of protectionist strategies: limiting practice to citizens; demanding a lengthy, unpaid apprenticeship; setting an examination in the local language or law; excluding outsiders from certain functions ; demanding extortionate payments to local compensation and indemnity funds; insisting on reciprocity from the lawyer s home jurisdiction ; limiting advocacy by employed lawyers; and prohibiting multinational and multidisciplinary partnerships. Status concerns may be as important as market share: All lawyers fear dominance by accountants, and all other lawyers fear dominance by Americans. III.A number of writers have sought to reclaim the ideal of lawyer independence from the static functionalism of Parsons or Carr-Saunders and the apologetics of professional associations. Robert Gordon s revisionist account of the emergence of the American corporate bar in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the leading example. As a critical legal historian, Gordon seeks to demonstrate the relative autonomy and importance of ideology as a counterweight to excessively materialist and necessitarian theories. He boldly proclaims his theoretical idealism: Lawyers have slid into the modes of reaction, schizophrenia, and privatistic denial of any public role not from any innate depravity of the profession, but from the poverty of modem liberalism. He argues that elite corporate practitioners exhibit several kinds of autonomy.develop new legal forms, transactions, claims, and remedies, which can have unanticipated and even adverse consequences for their clients.I share many of Gordon s values. First, he focuses on the aberrational behavior of a small minority of lawyers as if economists constructed a theory of entrepreneurial activity based on Mobil s funding of Masterpiece Theater or Ben and Jerry s efforts to save tropical rain forests. Second, much of the evidence for independence concerns not the core of the professional role, but the margin what lawyers do after they have billed 2,000 hours a year. The public interest fellowships funded by Skadden Arps are the perfect example of lawyers schizophrenic ability to dissociate the most aggressive corporate representation from pro bono contributions. Third, lawyers charitable activities are quantitatively insignificant, whether measured in pro bono hours or cash contributions to legal aid, per lawyer or in the aggregate. But repeated studies have confirmed that law schools transform incoming law students who voice a identification with social justice into lawyers who choose material rewards, professional prestige, career stability, and technical proficiency. Most perplexing, however, is Gordon s central claim that lawyers can and should independently evaluate the means and ends of their clients. The ideal of independence contains a basic ambiguity: Should lawyers substitute their own ends or only make strategic judgments about means? The quixotic search for a universal class disinterestedly pursuing the common good has been repeatedly disappointed: Aristocrats rarely display noblesse oblige; the bourgeoisie are associated less with Enlightenment universalism than with the horrors of industrial capitalism; the proletariat may be classless, but they are also xenophobic, racist, and sexist; civil servants are petty bureaucrats; artists and intellectuals are self-absorbed. Corporate lawyers are particularly unlikely candidates for the role of universal class.Michael Katz, who operates an eviction mill for Los Angeles landlords and claims to have 10 percent of the market, boasted: I m a hired gun, bottom line. He threatens tenants with a bad credit rating to make them pay, even if they are not legally obligated because the premises are uninhabitable. Robert Nelson s study of four Chicago firms revealed that individual lawyers derive 20 to 60 percent of their income from a single client surely a strong disincentive for independence. Their identification with clients was so strong that few had ever perceived an ethical dilemma in representation. Two leading American law firms paid fines of 45 million and 50 million to settle government charges of complicity in the savings and loan scandal . Recent research has shown how solicitors take advantage of errors or incompetence by adversaries and find or carve loopholes in regulatory and tax regimes. The situations where lawyers do shape, resist, or even disregard client wishes are even more troubling. Legal aid lawyers and public defenders also may display greater loyalty to repeat players in the courtroom than to their one-shot clients. There is no escape from the basic paradox that lawyers who enjoy the greatest rewards of money, status, and power also are the most heteronomous, while those at the bottom of the professional hierarchy are most autonomous. Ironically, the principled refusal to promote immoral ends is less likely to be found among lawyers, who claim to be professionals, than advertising models, who have no such pretensions but may refuse to promote cigarettes or alcohol. Those claiming to oppose from within prosecutors solicitous of defendants rights, environmentalists purporting to keep their corporate employers honest may have access to power, but they rarely exercise it.resistance to public and private power, surely it makes more sense to study their opponents , oppositional lawyers , and dissident professional associations .Nor do professional associations urge independence. D Amato was convicted of mail fraud for billing Unisys 32,500 for consulting work he never did as part of a scheme to influence his brother, Senator Alfonse D Amato , an amicus brief was filed on his behalf by the New York State Bar Association, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, New York State Trial Lawyers Association, New York Criminal Bar Association, and New York Civil Liberties Union. Sentencing D Amato to five months, U.S. Others defend the professional project in terms of its potential to permit and encourage lawyer altruism. English barristers justify their monopoly of higher court advocacy on the ground that only they have sufficient independence an assertion most solicitors find insulting and unfounded. Solicitors, in turn, claim that the monopoly rents they reap from conveyancing are necessary to subsidize their undercompensated legal aid practice. Law is beyond monopoly only in the sense of such trendy phrases as postcolonial, postmodern, postindustrial, postcapitalist, postcommunist, and postapartheid.Alan Paterson closely follows Halliday but draws his metaphor from the Enlightenment, positing a social contract in which the state ensures the profession reasonable rewards in return for altruism.his 1952 retirement from Allen Overy, the leading City firm he had founded: He completely identified himself with his client... And the Law Society repaid state support of its anticompetitive rules not with an outpouring of altruism but by opposing salaried legal aid and law centres. Michael Burrage is most profoundly hostile to sociological critiques of the professional project. He vigorously defends the efforts of lawyers to raise their status, attributing the extremely high standard of honour of the English Bar and its non-competitive, disinterested style of work to its high social standing. The legal profession, perhaps more than others, pursued collective mobility by deliberately excluding aspirants on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. The explicit purpose of the Law Society s preliminary examination in Latin and Greek was to exclude men who have traveled up the gutter from Fleet Street to the Law Institution. Harry S. Drinker, author of the first American code of legal ethics in 1908, echoed these sentiments, condemning Russian Jew-boys who had come up out of the gutter ... Harlan Fiske Stone, Columbia Law School dean and Supreme Court Justice, deplored the influx to the bar of greater numbers of the unfit, who exhibit racial tendencies toward study by memorization and a mind almost Oriental in its fidelity to the minutiae of the subject without regard to any controlling rule or reason. Elihu Root and Dean Swan of Yale Law School opposed the admission of immigrants, especially Jews.Burrage is particularly distressed by the increasing role of universities as the entry route into the profession and the declining role of apprenticeship, which he endows with a unique capacity to instill ethical values. The superior honor he attributes to barristers cannot be explained by apprenticeship since, until recently, pupillage was a voluntary six months and articles a mandatory five years! Nor is it clear how barristers honor can be reconciled with the late return of briefs or perfunctory conferences with legally aided defendants prior to a plea bargain.their honorable contempt for trade only by relying on working-class clerks to tout for solicitors business. Ethnoreligious minorities entered the American profession in significant numbers only when law schools displaced apprenticeship in the first two decades of the twentieth century.IV.Several decades after first applying their discipline to analyze substantive law, economists have belatedly addressed legal institutions and processes, including the profession itself.The large law firm has attracted disproportionate interest, perhaps because of its social prominence, economic rewards, rapid growth, and dramatic transformation. Charles Derber has adapted class analysis to argue that professionals are subjected to ideological proletarianization while successfully resisting technical proletarianization . More recently, however, other researchers have observed a more conventional proletarianization. Greater use of computers to conduct research and generate legal forms has led to either the replacement of lawyers by paralegals or the creation of a substratum of lawyers with little decisional responsibility or client contact. John Hagan and his associates have portrayed these developments as the emergence of class relations within the legal profession, highlighting the ?overrepresentation of women in the lower classes. It is noteworthy that accountants often the precursors of change in the legal profession have adopted the corporate form, selling equity interests to raise capital for expansion, and hiring nonaccountant subordinates . Critical observers have interpreted the emergence and growth of large firms as the exploitation of subordinated labor, noting that fee-earning employees generate substantially more in billings than they cost in salary or overhead. Some explain the lengthy apprenticeship and denial of partnership to all but a small fraction as deterrents to opportunism and shirking. Galanter and Palay argue that partners own surplus reputational capital, which they rent to associates, but, although they portray law firms as pyramid schemes where partner greed drives unsustainable growth, firms actually grow at very different rates. The 1994 dissolution of Shea and Gould, which had more than 350 lawyers at its zenith, was attributable less to quarrels about money than to struggles for status and power within the firm and personality conflicts among inflated egos. It may not matter much whether some large-firm lawyers are exploiting others few observers are deeply troubled by the suffering of lawyers who earn more than 100,000 a year. Why do they seem so much more numerous and prominent in some societies than others the United States and Japan usually being represented as the extremes. An extreme and poorly substantiated case for the latter view has prompted a barrage of criticism, which may have the desirable effect of stimulating more sophisticated economic analysis of the profession, V.Although many of these theoretical controversies were joined after the initial publication of the empirical data presented in the following ?national and synthetic essays, the exchanges can be illuminated and refined by comparative study of legal professions. I hope readers will be encouraged to formulate their own theoretical frameworks for understanding the legal profession, test them against the accounts presented here, and be provoked to conduct the research suggested by lacunae and ambiguities. NOTES ?July 9, 1993. A Virginia lawyer, angered by the Miller ad, wrote, produced, and paid to run a spoof in which a cowgirl lassos Philip Millerd and condemns him for the health effects of cigarettes.Local legal professions within federal polities have sometimes engaged in similar competition. ?and complete with gold scales-of-justice seal and a legend attesting to exceptional skill, experience and excellence in advocacy. In the first nine months he had seventy-five takers. The Inner Circle of Advocates, founded for the same purpose twenty years ago, has preserved its exclusivity through a humerus clausus of 100.REFERENCES ABA Journal.Abbott, Andrew 1988. .Abel, Richard L. ., Law in the Balance: Legal Services in the Eighties. . . . 49 Modern Law Review 1. ., Lawyers in Society , Vol. ., Lawyers in Society , Vol. . . ., New Directions in the Study of Justice. . . . Amark, Klas.American Bar Association, Commission on Professionalism.Alfieri, Anthony V.Aron, Nan.: Westview Press. 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I have chosen this concept of professionalism over others that stress technical expertise, or standards of competence and ethical behavior, or altruism because it seems to me to illuminate a great deal of the history and contemporary experience of English lawyers. There can be little doubt that nineteenth century solicitors consciously and energetically sought market control, and it is painfully clear today that both branches of the profession are deeply upset about threats to their continued exercise of such control. Second, the divided English legal profession offers a natural laboratory for observing the choice of tactics in the professional project and their relative success or failure. All occupations under capitalism are compelled to seek control over their markets. The only alternative is to be controlled by the market a situation that is fraught with uncertainty at best and may lead to economic extinction at worst. Of course, no occupation controls its market totally, and none is wholly without influence; control is a question of degree and constantly changes. Occupations that produce goods may pursue this goal by seeking to restrict raw materials or technology, but occupations that produce services constrain supply principally by regulating the production of pro- ?ducers. Although advocates of control invariably portray their object as improving the quality of services, we should not let this claim blind us to the fact that any improvement necessarily also limits entry. At one extreme of the spectrum of control, the profession imposes a numerus clausus illustrated by some nineteenth century continental legal professions, notaries in certain countries today, and elite advocates, such as Queen s Counsel in England and avocats of the Conseil d Etat and the Cour de Cassation in France. At the other extreme, entry to the occupational category is governed by market forces: demand for professional services on one hand and the distribution of ability, energy, and inclination on the other hand. Market control is inextricably related to occupational status, not only symbolizing status but also enhancing it instrumentally, both by restricting numbers and by controlling the characteristics of entrants.ENTRY TO THE PROFESSION In order to trace the dramatic fluctuations in the kind and degree of supply control that English lawyers have exercised during the last century and a half, it is useful to choose as a baseline the entry barriers that prevailed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Barristers and solicitors differed significantly in the extent to which each branch emphasized ascribed or achieved qualities the character of the whole person or narrow technical skills and in whether controls were formal or informal, visible or invisible. THE PREMODERN HERITAGE The Bar entered the nineteenth century with stringent constraints on the kind of person who might become a barrister, constraints that had been in place for several hundred years.who governed the four Inns of Court had complete discretion to admit or reject a student; applicants had to state their condition in life and provide references from two barristers. The Inns of Court extended a preference to university graduates, shortening the number of years they had to keep terms from five to three and the number of dinners they had to eat each term from six to three, so that the burden on nongraduates was more than three times as onerous. Partly for this reason, half of all barristers were university graduates at a time when this privilege was enjoyed by only a tiny fraction of the population and restricted to upper-class members of the Established Church. Once called to the Bar, the fledgling barrister was expected to serve a pupillage of one to two years with an established barrister or other legal professional.Two things about this entry process are striking, although perhaps not immediately apparent. The Bar student then had to pay a fee of 30 to 40 for admission to his Inn of Court and deposit an additional 100, which was refunded without interest only after call. During his three to five years as a student, while forbidden to work at most trades, he incurred annual expenses of 5 to 10 for hall dinners, 6 to 8 for books, and about 150 for maintenance. Once established in his own chambers, the barrister could not expect to earn enough from practice to support himself for several years , although he might make ends meet by deviling , tutoring, marking examination papers, law reporting, or editing. A midnineteenth century estimate put the one-time costs at 300 and the annual maintenance at 250 from entering university to reaching economic self-sufficiency, which could be as long as ten years. These financial demands strongly reinforced the ascriptive criteria that influenced the university and the Inn to admit a student, the barrister to accept a pupil, and the client or solicitor to brief a fledgling barrister. The second noteworthy feature of this lengthy and arduous process of qualifying is that it had relatively little to do with the acquisition of technical skills. In addition, although we know little about the content of pupillage, certainly many barristers must have accepted pupils for the substantial premiums the latter paid rather than out of dedication to teaching.men ; colleague-ship at university and within the Inns may have reinforced such gentility; but neither selection nor training ensured technical competence in law. Because solicitors lacked the lengthy traditions of the Bar, they initially subjected entrants to fewer ascriptive criteria and, consequently, imposed fewer entry barriers of any sort. Nineteenth century solicitors were not expected to attend university; indeed, only 5 percent of enrolled solicitors were graduates as late as the 1870s. This was an ascriptive barrier in two senses: the apprentice obtained his place through personal contacts, often with a solicitor who was a relative, family friend, or business acquaintance; and articles were expensive about 100 for stamp duty and 200 for the premium paid to the solicitor. Yet, unlike the Bar student or pupil, the articled clerk could minimize his expenses by living at home, since articles were available all over England, not only in London . And at the end of his apprenticeship, the qualified solicitor could attain immediate economic self-sufficiency through salaried employment with a firm and could look forward to joining the partnership or setting up his own practice. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, barristers and solicitors thus diverged in their exercise of supply control. Solicitors also employed ascriptive barriers, but these were less elaborate and seem to have been more closely related to the acquisition of legal knowledge. Because articles lasted several times as long as pupillage and because the supervising solicitor generally expected to employ the apprentice thereafter, it seems plausible that the experience conferred at least a modicum of technical skill. CONSTRUCTING MODERN CRITERIA These differences between the branches became considerably more pronounced during the next hundred years. In 1829, Inner Temple required all students who had not matriculated at university to pass an examination in history and either Latin or Greek; although this requirement was abandoned briefly when the other Inns failed to adopt it, the examination had become universal by the last quarter of the nineteenth ?century. It resisted the example of physicians, solicitors, and colonial lawyers, all of whom had adopted formal examinations, for the Bar feared that this might facilitate entry rather than restrain it, thereby admitting the wrong kind of person. Graduates sat it a few months after leaving university, and 80 percent to 90 percent were passing at the end of the nineteenth century. Although the Inns created the Council of Legal Education in the midnineteenth century, it had a minimal teaching staff and relied heavily on practitioners. Thus the barriers to becoming a barrister remained much the same until after World War II: cost and the particularistic decisions of universities, pupilmasters, and heads of chambers. Solicitors pursued a very different path toward controlling the production of producers. In the absence of substantial ascriptive barriers, the number of solicitors seems to have doubled in the first third of the nineteenth century. Partly in response, one of the early acts of the Incorporated Law Society was to impose a professional examination in 1836, nearly four decades before the senior branch did so. This decision to use achievement rather than ascription as the principal entry barrier seems to have had its desired effect: the issuance of new practicing certificates dropped by almost a quarter over the next fifteen years, and the number of solicitors stabilized for four decades . Twenty-five years after initiating professional examinations , the Law Society added a second hurdle: the Intermediate Examination, taken by articled clerks during their apprenticeship. Although the pass rates for each examination were very high when it first was introduced, all of them declined fairly steadily and were approaching 50 percent at the beginning of World War II; since all three had to be passed, their cumulative effect was even greater. The Law Society also was more serious about professional education: it instituted lectures for articled clerks in 1833, three years before the first professional examination, and progressively expanded the offerings at its Chancery Lane headquarters.clerks, like Bar students, preferred private crammers; and little instruction was available outside London and a few major provincial cities. In response, the Law Society made two major changes in 1922: it required a compulsory year of lectures prior to the Intermediate Examination, and it subsidized such instruction at provincial universities. By contrast with its concern for technical competence, the Law Society did little to raise ascriptive barriers. Individual exemptions were granted freely from the preliminary liberal arts examination imposed in 1861 , and categorical exemptions rapidly proliferated, not just for university matriculates but also for those who passed a host of other exams. The proportion of solicitors with university degrees remained small: less than a fifth of all entrants in the first decade of the twentieth century , less than a third as late as World War II. At the same time, it must be recognized that preparation for the three professional examinations itself was costly and became an important, if indirect, barrier to those who could not afford to study full time or pay the crammers. FLUCTUATIONS IN ENTRY How effective were the divergent strategies of barristers and solicitors in controlling the production of producers? In answering this question, it is essential to bear in mind the impact of extraneous events, the most important of which were World Wars I and II. The next generation of solicitors was affected even more seriously: more than half of all articled clerks served, of whom 358 were killed and 458 seriously wounded . Although these losses were inflicted on the profession, it also bears some responsibility for failing to respond to them by admitting more solicitors after the war . In addition to those killed and disabled, there was a shortfall in production of 1,700 solicitors, if the ten years beginning in 1914 are compared to the previous decade. The experience of World War II was similar: more than 500 solicitors and clerks were killed, and there was a shortfall in production of more than 1,500. Together, professional supply control and extraneous tragedies had a dramatic effect on the number of solicitors . The rapid increase in the production of solicitors in the first third of the nineteenth century halted abruptly in 1835 which happened to be the year before the first professional examination was admin- ?istered, although it would be dangerous to infer causality.7 percent between 1913 and 1920 and remained virtually static between 1939 and 1952. As a result, solicitors entered the postwar period with almost exactly the same number that had been in practice more than half a century earlier . Nevertheless, available data show the number of barristers doubling between the first and the last quarters of the nineteenth century, declining by a fourth following World War I, and remaining at that depressed level until well after World War II. THE POSTWAR TRANSFORMATION The period since World War II, and especially the last two decades, have witnessed a major transformation in both the means and the extent of control over the production of producers. The distinctive characteristics of barristers and solicitors continued to color their different responses, but the overwhelming changes that both branches confronted induced a significant convergence between them. The 100 deposit required before admission to an Inn was eliminated for most students, the 50 stamp duty on call to the Bar was abolished in 1947, and other fixed fees became less burdensome as a result of inflation. Although the Bar formally required a university degree in 1975, the growth of tertiary education and, more importantly, government grants to undergraduates made it easier to obtain this credential .The Bar also began to relate entry barriers more closely to technical competence. Students without a law degree now must spend a year studying law in a polytechnic and pass an additional examination. All entrants must take a year of vocational training prior to the final examination, and the number of places available at the Inns at Court School of Law has been limited in recent years . Final examination pass rates remain high, however: nearly 90 percent of intending practitioners succeeded on their first try in the early 1980s, although the proportion has fallen significantly in the last few years. Yet, the Bar certainly has not relinquished all control to the academy. First, the Bar mandated a one-year pupillage in 1959 ; six years later, it prohibited pupils from taking briefs during their first six months. Although the pupillage fee declined in importance after World War II and was abolished in 1975, maintenance during this year remains a serious problem, since no government grants are available, Inn scholarships are few in number and inadequate in amount, and briefs are difficult to obtain even in the second six months. Furthermore, a bottleneck has developed as the number seeking pupillages has multiplied rapidly while the number of barristers willing to act as pupilmasters has remained constant. Although the Bar maintains that every intending practitioner is placed, competition has intensified, and personal contacts and ascriptive characteristics clearly weigh heavily. Second, and more important, the Bar requires every private practitioner to obtain a tenancy . In the nineteenth century, fledgling barristers simply opened their own chambers; this would be prohibitively expensive today, and in any case a new barrister practicing alone would attract very little business. In the early twentieth century, natural attrition in a relatively static profession created space for all who wished to enter; however, the rapid growth in the number of Bar students and pupils in the last two decades has disrupted this accommodation. The problem of tenancies is unique to England as well as to the postwar period: advocates in Scotland and barristers in some Australian states practice individually, and office space and assistance by a pool of clerks are available to all new entrants. Until recently, all London chambers were located in one of the Inns; even now only five of the more than 200 London sets have moved outside, and several of those also are outsiders in terms of political orientation or racial composition. Chambers within the Inns are grossly overcrowded, however, partly because the Inns traditionally have leased much of their space to residential or other commercial tenants. In the six years between 1975 and 1981, when the Bar grew by 28 percent, available space in the Inns expanded only 8 percent. As a result, every year since 1965 there has been a shortfall in the tenancies available to barristers completing their pupillages, sometimes by as much as 50 percent. More than 100 qualified barristers have occupied the amorphous status of floaters ever since the Senate began keeping records in 1974. This physical shortage of space has greatly intensified competition for entry, increasing the weight that heads of chambers give to ascriptive qualities in accepting tenants and discouraging many students and pupils from entering private practice. The third barrier confronting the qualified beginner also is peculiar to the Bar: because private practitioners cannot be employed, they must find business on their own. The difficulties of doing so remained acute in the early postwar period: most barristers lost money in their first year and made only a nominal amount in their second. And between 1955 and 1959, the number of barristers with less than ten years of experience who left practice ranged from half to three-quarters of the number entering practice that year. In this respect , barristers resembled small-scale entrepreneurs, most of whose businesses fail, rather than professionals, who make a lifetime commitment to a career . Yet, the situation of the novice improved dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of the growth of legal aid, which ensured at least a minimum level of subsistence. Juniors with less than nine years of experience, practicing at the family, common law, or criminal Bars in London, or on circuit, obtained between 59 and 72 percent of their incomes from public sources in 1974 75. Consequently, departures from practice of those with less than ten years of experience dropped dramatically after 1959; although absolute numbers have risen slightly since 1976, they still represent only a tenth to a quarter of those starting practice. Solicitors responded differently to the postwar environment. The length of articles was reduced by a year for both graduates and nongraduates; however, since the former now greatly outnumber the latter, the effective period of apprenticeship has been cut from five years to two. More importantly, clerks began to receive salaries: 200 in the 1950s, 500 in the 1960s, 1,600 in 1976, and 3,000 to 4,000 today, although this still is insufficient for maintenance. Because the number of law graduates seeking articles increased rapidly, while the number of solicitors qualified and willing to take on clerks ?remained fairly constant, competition for articles intensified. Firms today receive dozens of applications for each position, students write even more letters in order to obtain a place, and those with contacts fare far better than do those who use more universalistic methods, such as the Law Society Register or a university appointments board. The scramble for articles serves both to distribute law graduates across the hierarchy of solicitors firms and to discourage those with poorer degrees earned at less prestigious institutions from seeking to enter private practice. Primarily for symbolic reasons, the Law Society has refrained from formalizing the academic barriers to entry. It still is posssible for mature students to become solicitors without obtaining A levels , although the proportion of entrants who do so is insignificant. Similarly, a university degree is not required, although more than 90 percent of new solicitors now are university graduates, and almost all of these are law graduates . All aspiring solicitors, like all barristers, must complete a vocational year; but almost three-quarters of the students at the Law Society s College of Law in 1980 had received local authority grants . The rapid growth in the prevalence of legal education also has reduced the significance of professional examinations in controlling quality and numbers. The nine out of ten entrants with law degrees are exempt from the Common Professional Examination , which replaced the Intermediate Examination in 1980 and which, despite its name, is taken only by aspiring solicitors. More importantly, the high proportion of examinees with a legal education seems to be correlated with a rise in the pass rate on the Final Examination from an all-time low of 48 percent in 1952 to a high of 74 percent in 1977 a level approaching that of the Bar Final, which historically has been much easier. The Law Society has imposed a requirement of forty-eight hours of continuing education in the first three years of practice; the Senate, on the other hand, told the Royal Commission that postqualification education would not be appropriate to the circumstances of the Bar. Both branches of the profession thus have lost to academic legal education much of their control over the production of producers. First, it is a transfer of the locus of control: from professionals and their associations to universities and polytechnics and the governmental bodies that determine their enrollments and funding.tently has been more universalistic than private associations or individuals, this transfer largely eliminated the principal ascriptive barrier to the profession: the exclusion of half the population on the basis of gender . Half a century before Parliament compelled the profession to admit women and long before the academy became the principal mode of professional qualification, University College, London, allowed women to read law. In 1967, when women constituted 5 percent of the Bar and 3 percent of solicitors, they were 17 percent of entering law students at university and 11 percent at polytechnics. They were 45 percent of all domestic undergraduate law students enrolled in universities in 1983 84 and 47 percent of full-time domestic law students admitted to polytechnics for the fall term in 1984.The third element of this transformation in the institutional structure of control is the growing heterogeneity of the academy. Prior to World War II, academic legal education was concentrated at Oxford, Cambridge, and the three London colleges, which together enrolled three-quarters of all students; the remainder were distributed among the seven older provincial universities. By 1980 81, Oxbridge had fallen to 12 percent, London had 9 percent, the older provincial universities enrolled 24 percent, eleven other universities had launched law courses with 22 percent of the students, and the twenty-four new polytechnic law programs enrolled a third of all students. Not surprisingly, the convergence of three factors a government eager to provide social services , universities and polytechnics interested in expanding, and women determined to pursue careers produced a dramatic increase in law enrollments, perhaps the most dramatic ever experienced in any country . In the United States, law school enrollment expanded more slowly even during its period of most rapid growth and has increased only threefold since World War II. Although supply control had been transformed, it still was being exercised if now by the academy. Law departments received between ten and twenty applications per place in the 1970s; although much of this imbalance is explained by multiple applications, little more than 40 percent of all applicants obtained a place anywhere.tantamount to graduation. Although at least nine out of ten university law students graduate , only three-quarters of full-time and about a third of part-time polytechnic students complete their courses. UNPRECEDENTED EXPANSION Let me summarize these changes in control over the production of producers as a preface to examining their consequences. The formal educational requirements of the two branches converged in a law degree and a year of professional training, while local government grants became widely available to defray the cost of the former, if not always the latter. The solicitors Final Examination came to resemble the Bar Final as a hurdle that most law graduates could expect to overcome. In addition, the attrition of qualified barristers during the early years of practice because of insufficient business declined with the growth of legal aid. More importantly, there were enough jobs for most who wanted to be assistant solicitors but not nearly enough tenancies for beginning barristers. These changes in the structure of supply control had an extraordinary impact on the rates of entry into the two branches after World War II . Although there was some catch-up in starts at the Bar for the first five years, the numbers began to decline by 1950. The efficacy of supply control is visible in the fact that the Bar actually shrank each year from 1955 to 1961, a total decline of 5 percent, and the 1950 rate of entry was not attained again until 1965. Then the transformation described above began to take effect as the number of first law degrees increased from 1,072 in 1965 to 3,564 in 1980, or 232 percent. Starts at the Bar, which averaged 104 a year between 1955 and 1964, rose to 150 between 1965 and 1969, 246 between 1970 and 1974, and 317 between 1975 and 1984 a threefold increase.7 percent between 1954 and 1961, increased at 3.5 percent a year between 1961 and 1969 and at a staggering 8.2 percent a year between 1969 and 1978, before slowing to 3.2 percent a year between 1978 and 1984.entirely lose control over supply, and the decline in the ratio of starts to calls after 1975 76 is consistent with my contention that the Bar s restriction on the number of tenancies remains a significant barrier. Solicitors display a pattern of growth that is similar in gross but different in detail. For the next fourteen years, average annual admissions fell to 701, as a result of which the profession grew at an annualized rate of only I percent during the 1950s. Thereafter admissions increased rapidly: an average of 1,120 a year between 1965 and 1969, 1,777 between 1970 and 1974, 2,391 between 1975 and 1979, and 3,380 for the first two years of this decade, before declining, to 2,522 between 1982 and 1984.4 percent between 1959 and 1968 and 5.9 percent between 1968 and 1982, although growth has fallen off in the last two years.Although barristers and solicitors have shown similar periods of stasis and change in the last four decades, the differential impact of the postwar environment on their strategies of supply control also is apparent. Because the Bar relied so heavily on ascriptive criteria, it could offer less resistance to the increasing dominance of meritocratic ideology; and given its much smaller base, its rate of growth inevitably was much higher. However, control over the number of tenancies by the Inns and by heads of chambers was able to slow the growth of the Bar five years before the growth of solicitors began to decline. The same forces that produced the unparalleled rate of expansion in both branches during the 1960s and 1970s also explain why that expansion has levelled off.9 percent between 1961 and 1976, it increased at only 1.2 percent thereafter; polytechnic enrollment rose at an annualized rate of 65.9 percent between 1970 and 1976 but at only 7.0 percent between 1976 and 1980. Furthermore, the entry of women into law departments, which explains much of the growth of these departments, has stabilized at just under half. We can expect both branches to continue to grow for several more decades because the rate of production will outweigh deaths and retirements in the much smaller cohort of older lawyers: over the last ten years an average of 2,540 solicitors have been admitted annually, but only 1,107 have left practice; 314 barristers have started but only 124 have left.stant and gradually decline, however.THE COMPOSITION OF THE PROFESSION This new mechanism affects not only the size of the profession but also its composition. First, the radically different levels of recruitment before and after the 1960s have produced a small cohort of older lawyers and a much larger cohort of younger practitioners. Whereas only 34 percent of all barristers were within ten years of call in 1966, a decade later 57 percent fell in this category. Similarly, only 47 percent of solicitors were forty or younger in 1969, but a mere seven years later 58 percent had been in practice for less than sixteen years, almost all of whom would be under forty. It is noteworthy that this imbalance in age distribution is considerably more pronounced among barristers, a reflection of the fact that supply control, initially more stringent, was relaxed more profoundly, as well as of the smaller size of the Bar. Although I can only speculate, it seems plausible to suggest that the large cohorts of younger lawyers have been and will be increasingly dissatisfied with restrictive practices that favor older lawyers and with structures of governance that institutionalize gerontocracy. When the academy displaced the profession as principal gatekeeper, explicit reliance on ascribed characteristics gave way to an ideology of meritocracy. As late as half a century after Parliament ended the profession s formal exclusion of women in 1919, they still were only 3 percent of solicitors and 5.4 percent of barristers. With the growth of law departments and the even more important changes in consciousness wrought by the feminist movement, the Bar began to change in the late 1950s. Although the proportion of women grew steadily, it also grew slowly and seems to have peaked in the mid-1970s at about 15 percent to 20 percent of starts, only half the proportion of women law students. The number of women solicitors, by contrast, did not begin to grow markedly until the 1970s; but by 1980, the proportion of new solicitors who were women equaled the proportion of law graduates who were women. These differences between the branches cannot be explained in terms of the Bar s claim to be more demanding, for women law graduates are, if anything, more capable than men law graduates. Incomplete statistics suggest that the proportion of women applicants admitted to law departments is less than half that of men , and women ?law students do just as well as their male counterparts in obtaining honors degrees. Two factors seem responsible for the difference and are difficult to separate. Women encounter greater problems than do men in securing pupillages and many more obstacles in obtaining both tenancies and business during the early years of practice. The first two decisions are controlled by heads of chambers, most of whom are elderly men likely to retain prejudices against women barristers. The third is influenced significantly by senior clerks, also mostly men, whose patriarchal views may be reinforced by the belief that women tenants will charge lower fees than men and thus earn the clerk less income. Where, as in Scotland, advocates practice individually rather than in chambers and are served by a common pool of clerks, women have come to represent half of all new advocates. The second explanation for the low proportion of women barristers turns on structural factors rather than individual prejudices. It is extremely difficult to combine a career at the Bar with family responsibilities, either by working part time or by leaving practice and returning after child-rearing. By contrast, employment in a firm, a company, or a government office may open one or both possibilities to women solicitors. Whether individual or institutional biases are dominant, their effect is visible in the fact that women law students express a stronger preference than men for becoming solicitors and a weaker preference for the Bar. The experience of black lawyers has been almost the opposite of that of women. Blacks from the colonies have been called to the Bar since at least the early nineteenth century, although few, if any, practiced in England. At the same time, as the black population of England increased, so did the number of black barristers, which now approximates 5 percent of the Bar. Blacks have responded to discrimination in the allocation of tenancies and briefs by forming all black chambers serving a largely black clientele. For this reason, and also because of the greater difficulty of the solicitors examinations and the larger size of the solicitors branch, the approximately 200 black solicitors now in practice represent only 0.25 percent of the profession. On one hand, the academy has admitted indeed, actively recruited an increasing number of overseas law students, whose tuition payments subsidize the cost of educating domestic ?students . On the other hand, heightened competition for places in law departments has made legal education less accessible to domestic black applicants disadvantaged by inadequate primary and secondary schooling.Nor has that transformation significantly affected the class composition of the profession. The traditional claim by barristers that they enjoy a superior social status was derived partly from the higher proportion of university graduates among them and the Bar s more exclusive ascriptive barriers. Yet the emergence of common qualifications for the two branches, and particularly the expectation that entrants to both will possess a law degree, seem to have erased these differences. One reason is the centrality of the academy, which always has selected disproportionately from the upper social stata and continues to do so even after the creation of the polytechnics. Indeed, because women still must overcome substantial social and cultural barriers, those who succeed tend to come from even more privileged backgrounds than men law students. The emergence of the academy as the principal gatekeeper to the legal profession thus made a major contribution to eliminating gender as an ascriptive barrier but, simultaneously, magnified the barrier of class and provided a new legitimation for the barrier of race. Furthermore, although we lack the data to test these hypotheses, it seems plausible to expect that class and race influence which academic institution a student attends and the quality of degree the student attains and that these, in turn, determine the nature of the apprenticeship and the first position the student obtains after qualifying. The academy thus not only is more selective but also performs the indispensable function of allocating graduates to positions within the professional hierarchy and justifying that allocation in meritocratic terms. LIMITING COMPETITION In order to control the market for its services, a profession must seek to regulate not only the production of producers but also production by ?producers. This occurs only at a later stage of the professional project: an occupational category that limited the competitive energies of its own members before they had demarcated themselves from other service providers quickly would succumb to outside competitors who were not similarly restrained. We can distinguish two types of control over production by producers: the definition and defense of the professional monopoly against external competitors and the elaboration of restrictive practices limiting internal competition.MONOPOLY The legal profession s attempt to define its monopoly was complicated by the existence of two branches concerned with patrolling the boundaries that divide them as well as those that exclude other occupations. During the course of the nineteenth century barristers and solicitors reached an accommodation : solicitors ceased to challenge the Bar s exclusive right of audience in the higher courts, and barristers relinquished any claim to perform conveyances or to serve clients without the intermediation of solicitors. The Bar has been very successful in defending its turf, perhaps because advocacy occupies the core of the legal profession s identity and is a highly visible activity, whose elaborate ritual and arcane language proclaim the esoteric qualities of law.On the other hand, barristers and solicitors are opposed in their struggle over the right of audience in the higher courts, which traditionally also has conferred eligibility for appointment to the bench not only a prize for those few who attain it but also an important foundation for the Bar s collective assertion of superior status. The greater difficulty of justifying a monopoly against fellow lawyers may help to explain the vigor with which the Bar opposed nineteenth-century proposals for common training with solicitors. At the same time, the erosion of supply control among solicitors may stimulate the latter to press their claims more strongly. The historic compromise between the branches survived the Royal Commission inquiry of the late 1970s, in which the Law Society sought only a modest expansion of solicitors rights of audience.this claim, its concern to cut costs, together with the fact that it presently pays for half of all barristers services, renders the Bar s monopoly precarious. Even if it is not abolished, the monopoly still may be eroded through the progressive expansion of lower-court jurisdiction, increased use of employed lawyers , and the grant to solicitors of specific, if not general, rights of audience. Nevertheless, barristers may preserve a good deal of the market for higher-court advocacy by means of informal conventions despite the demise of formal rules. Solicitors always have had greater difficulty defining and defending their monopoly. Furthermore, whereas solicitors have been quite restrained in challenging the Bar, lay competitors have been far more aggressive in invading the domain of solicitors. Banks and trust companies, accountants, real estate agents, companies, and trade unions all perform solicitors work for their customers, employees, and members. The lay public also seems less tolerant of the solicitors monopoly than they are of the barristers exclusive right of audience, perhaps because consumers encounter the former more often and more directly. Recent legislation has forced solicitors to share it with a new paraprofession of licensed conveyancers; however, there is continuing uncertainty about the role of banks and building societies . On first impression this incursion, which solicitors vigorously resisted, appears to be an awesome loss, without precedent in the annals of any other profession, for solicitors derive half of their incomes from conveyancing. The change will be felt more heavily by smaller firms, which typically earn a higher proportion of their income from conveyancing. In order to remain competitive, they will have to expand their volume through advertising, routinize conveyancing through computerization, and transfer work to paraprofessionals, all of which will foster concentration and render solicitors more like their lay competitors that is, less professional. Barristers, pressed by their own loss of supply control, threatened by solicitors, and perhaps concerned with allaying criticism about the wastefulness of the divided profession, may renew their demands to deal directly with other professionals and possibly even with lay clients. The monopoly of each branch is threatened not only by the other branch and by outsiders but also from within: by employed barristers and ?solicitors, whose numbers are expanding because private practice is able to absorb a declining proportion of the influx of new entrants produced by the erosion of supply control . First, the demarcation between employed barristers and employed solicitors is far more tenuous than the line that separates the branches in private practice. Third, the number of employed lawyers is augmented by reason of heightened demand as well as greater supply: clients may prefer to employ lawyers rather than retain private practitioners because the former are less expensive and more easily controlled. Moreover, having put lawyers on their payroll, employers are likely to add their own voices to the call for expanding the rights of audience of employed lawyers and for allowing all employed barristers to perform conveyances and to brief barristers in private practice without the intervention of a solicitor. INTRAPROFESSIONAL RESTRICTIONS Private practitioners seek to control their market not only by regulating the production of services by outsiders but also by limiting competition from fellow professionals. Just as barristers were first to control the production of producers, so they anticipated solicitors in elaborating a set of restrictive practices. Initially informal, these progressively were formalized during the nineteenth century as the Bar grew in size and subgroups declined in importance . Consequently, the Bar recently has been forced to relax several of its more conspicuous restrictive practices: the two-counsel rule , the two-thirds rule , and barriers to practice on the circuits . This sequence illustrates the peculiar situation of the Bar: on one hand, the nature of its market makes the restriction of competition particularly urgent; on the other hand, its internal structure facilitates such restriction ?through informal means. The performance of barristers in court is highly visible to potential consumers , and the measures of success or failure are superficially clear . Also, at least some of those consumers the larger firms possess considerable economic leverage by virtue of the amount of business they can offer.The Bar has minimized this danger in several ways. First, it has drastically curtailed competition between younger and older age cohorts by means of an artificial barrier between Queen s Counsel and juniors, which grants each a submonopoly . Although barristers still cannot form partnerships with each other , the Bar is not simply an aggregation of 5,000 individual competitors. Rather, it is grouped into about 200 sets in London and another 100 in some two dozen provincial cities; there is little competition between barristers in different cities. London sets are prevented from proliferating by the formal requirement of a clerk, the informal but effective restriction to the Inns, and the limited accommodation available within each Inn. Fourth, the homogeneity of social background and function among barristers and their geographic concentration within the Inns facilitate informal control. Finally, barristers are subject to hierarchic controls that reward conformity to restrictive practices: pupils are subordinate to pupilmasters and to those who allocate tenancies, younger barristers are subordinate to their heads of chambers and clerks, juniors who aspire to become Queen s Counsel are subordinate to judges who advise the Lord Chancellor, and even Queen s Counsel who seek appointment to the bench remain subordinate to the Lord Chancellor and the judges who advise him. The very characteristics that allowed the Bar to establish control over the production of producers in the first place and to reassert it after the academy introduced more meritocratic entry criteria thus also allow it to preserve control over production by producers through informal means, ?even after the demise of formal rules. Barrister s clerks establish ongoing relationships with solicitors firms, which allow the clerk to refer work to other chambers without fear of losing the firm as a future client. Barristers continue to charge and receive the full brief fee even if the case is settled and to bill separate fees for multiple clients in a single matter even if their representation does not increase the complexity of the task. Perhaps most importantly, the small number of chambers, and thus of barrister s clerks, and the intimate relations among the latter allow them to reach informal understandings about the level of fees. The restrictive practices of solicitors are different in several respects. Furthermore, unlike the solicitor who selects and evaluates barristers services, the individual consumer of solicitors services is a layperson who is likely to have little prior experience with law or lawyers. Such a client s relationships with solicitors generally are sporadic rather than continuous, and the lay consumer will encounter extreme difficulty in obtaining accurate information about price or quality. Consequently, not only does the solicitor-consumer have distinct advantages in purchasing barristers services but the solicitor-producer also has distinct advantages in selling services to individual consumers . It is striking that the relationship of each branch to its market is the obverse of the stereotype: solicitors paradoxically are more independent than barristers. Perhaps, then, one function of restrictive practices is to correct this disparity: to make barristers more independent of consumers and solicitors less so. Such an interpretation draws support from the fact that one of the most important restrictions on solicitors the regulation of fees in contentious matters is imposed externally. Because solicitors, when compared to barristers, are more numerous, geographically dispersed, and heterogeneous in background, organization, and function, restrictive practices also must be more formal. The Law Society promulgated ethical rules long before the Bar felt the need to formalize its own etiquette, therefore, and it regulated subjects, such as advertising and fees in noncontentious matters, that the Bar still leaves to informal controls.forming a partnership with other professions, or even sharing office space with other occupations, and the restriction on employed solicitors accepting private work from fellow employees all served to dampen intra-professional competition. The ceiling of twenty partners was lifted in 1967, with the result that forty-six firms now exceed that number; of these, two have at least sixty partners, three have fifty to fifty-nine, five have forty to forty-nine, and thirteen have thirty to thirty-nine.It seems unlikely that solicitors can continue to suppress competition by relying on the informal understandings that have worked so well for barristers. First, the same market characteristics that allow solicitors to dominate individual clients also encourage a firm that wishes to increase its market share to establish branch offices, merge with other firms, cut prices, and engage in aggressive advertising. Second, even if solicitors themselves are averse to such marketing strategies, they may be forced to adopt them by the threat of lay competition, especially now that the conveyancing monopoly has been diluted and perhaps broken. Whereas barristers may continue to control production by producers through informal understandings, solicitors thus seem likely to face increasingly unconstrained competition from outside the profession as well as within. STIMULATING DEMAND Historically, lawyers sought to control their market by limiting supply before they turned to the alternative strategy of creating demand. True, lawyers are at least partly responsible for the fact that substantive and procedural laws are so complex that laypersons must hire professionals both to litigate and to perform noncontentious transactions, such as conveyances and the distribution of estates. However, neither the institutional infrastructure nor the legitimating ideology for large-scale demand creation existed before the emergence of the welfare state after World War II. Furthermore, it is the recent erosion of professional control over the production of and by producers that motivated lawyers to seek to stimulate demand. But I do not want to overstate the argument that professions have shifted from supply to demand as the principal locus of market control: lawyers have done so slowly, reluctantly, and ineffectively.BARRISTERS AND THE PUBLIC SECTOR In many ways, the Bar has encountered greater difficulty in influencing demand. Indeed, the principal sources of increased demand for barristers services criminal and matrimonial cases are matters over which the profession has no control whatsoever. All that barristers realistically can do to influence demand is seek to ensure that those who must litigate actually do retain counsel . In pursuing this goal, barristers enjoy certain advantages: the state s obligation to provide legal assistance is less problematic in court than outside and less problematic in criminal proceedings than in civil; and there are no functional equivalents to barristers as advocates . The means of guaranteeing representation, of course, has been legal aid. Second, the institution emerged at a time when the supply of barristers actually was declining and traditional restrictive practices were firmly in place. Nevertheless, the growth of the Bar from the early 1960s clearly is inseparable from the expanding legal aid budget generated by rising crime and divorce rates, regardless of whether legal aid is seen as the cause of eroding supply control encouraging law students to enter the Bar confident that they would be able to survive the early years of practice or as a response to numbers that were augmented by other causes. For all juniors, the proportions were almost a third and almost a half; indeed, juniors with a London criminal practice derived about two-thirds of their incomes from legal aid in 1976 77 more than 90 percent from all public funds. The state thus paid for the doubling of the Bar. Although the Bar has advocated greater client eligibility and more generous payments to barristers, much of the growth of the legal aid budget is attributable to the extrinsic social phenomena that generate demand for legal services, such as crime and divorce. Nor has the Bar had to worry about the impact of these new sources of demand on the distribution, and particularly the concentration, of business.same fashion as are briefs from private clients: by solicitors dealing with barrister s clerks. First, the state is both more powerful than many private clients and less willing to acquiesce in the Bar s restrictive practices: it sets the fees for criminal legally aided work, and legal aid committees decide whether a Queen s Counsel is required and whether the latter needs the assistance of a junior. Second, a Bar that derives half of its income from the state no longer can make as persuasive an argument for its independence and altruism and thus for its claim to be a profession.SOLICITORS AND THE PRIVATE MARKET In one respect, the situation of solicitors is similar. Conveyancing, which has provided half of the income of solicitors for at least a century, rises and falls with the economy. Fortunately, the dramatic growth in the production of solicitors during the last two decades coincided with an equally pronounced increase in the value of housing, superimposed on a long-term rise in the prevalence of home ownership and the geographic mobility of the population. This may be part of the reason why solicitors have been so passive in the face of incursions by accountants and members of other occupations in the fields of tax advice, government regulation, and general business counseling. As real estate values stabilize or decline and solicitors lose some or all of their conveyancing monopoly, however, they will have to look elsewhere for new demand. Unlike barristers, solicitors have not relied heavily on legal aid. One reason is that solicitors have earned only a quarter of their incomes from contentious work and only a small proportion of this from cases that are likely to be legally aided, such as criminal defense , personal injuries , and matrimonial matters . Since solicitors have rights of audience only in the lower courts, the cases that they can handle are less serious and consequently command smaller fees; and the legal advice scheme also discourages lengthy or elaborate consultations.profitably only when they are mass-produced. Consequently, whereas most barristers do a fair amount of legal aid work, at least in the early stages of their careers, and thus share a collective interest in the institution, only about a third of all solicitors firms earn even a tenth of their incomes from this source. Other forms of demand creation also pose serious problems for solicitors. Even if the latter may be more impressionable , they also are more difficult to reach because they are more numerous, more anonymous, and much less interested in legal services. They can engage in advertising directed at their mass market indeed, the Law Society launched several institutional campaigns in the 1970s and recently allowed individual solicitors to advertise. Such efforts are likely to be expensive and relatively unprofitable, however, at least unless the investment is substantial and continuous over a long period. And it runs the risk of encouraging dependence on the favor of occupations that channel clients to solicitors police, for instance, who advise criminal accused, or real estate agents who counsel home buyers.But the greatest problem is that successful efforts to create demand inevitably tend to affect its distribution. Advertising by an individual firm probably is a good deal more productive than the institutional campaigns of the Law Society, but it benefits only that firm. The problem becomes more acute when public resources are used to create demand, for then all qualified producers seem to feel an entitlement to share equally in the additional business generated. Such a belief may underlie the Law Society s dissemination of lists of solicitors willing to handle legal aid matters, the rapid proliferation of Duty Solicitor schemes , the rosters of solicitors who volunteer to work at or take referrals from Citizens Advice Bureaus, and the initial hostility of solicitors to law centers thought to concentrate publicly subsidized work among employed lawyers.when it tums to publicly created demand, solicitors thus run the risk of intensifying intraprofessional competition when they seek to stimulate demand in the private market. THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF THE PROFESSION Both the strategies and the successes of the professional project of market control influence, and are affected by, the social organization of the two branches. We can trace these linkages by examining differentiation within the legal profession, the nature of the productive unit, and the consequences of both for stratification. INTERNAL DIFFERENTIATION The nineteenth century was a period of professional consolidation, the end product of which was the present division into two main branches. That same year the merger of law and equity reduced the distinctiveness of the Chancery Bar and formally eliminated the demarcation between solicitors and attorneys. Special pleaders and conveyancers, who had emerged several hundred years earlier in response to the enormous complexities of pleading and of encumbering and transferring land, had vanished by the end of the nineteenth century.The fundamental division of the profession into two branches persisted and even rigidified . Smaller firms derive economic power from their ability to delay payments to barristers, although the Bar recently has begun to retaliate. Furthermore, the greater economic security of solicitors is counterbalanced by the superior social status of barristers itself a composite of history, ascribed characteristics, functions, conventions of deference, the visibility of a few stars, and an exclusive relationship with the bench. If the division into two branches seems relatively fixed, there have been ?significant changes in differentiation within each. With the growth of provincial courts and the decline of circuits, however, provincial chambers expanded rapidly, containing a quarter of the Bar by the 1950s and nearly a third today. By the end of the nineteenth century they had established a number of provincial training centers for articled clerks, who naturally are found wherever there are solicitors. It is not surprising, therefore, that the distribution of solicitors for the last hundred years has been the inverse of the present distribution of barristers: two-thirds have practiced in the provinces and only a third in London. On this measure, as on others, the Bar enjoys greater social cohesiveness , a fact that may help to explain the different role of professional associations in the two branches. A second parameter along which differentiation has increased is employment . Although we lack adequate data, it seems unlikely that any barristers were employed until the beginning of the twentieth century, at the earliest. Some solicitors always have been employed in private practice; more recently, they have been employed by government and by commerce and industry. Consequently, employed solicitors rose from a quarter of those holding practicing certificates in 1939 to a third in 1957 and a half today. Employed barristers need not complete a pupillage, they lack rights of audience, they do not observe Bar etiquette and are not subject to Bar discipline, and few ever enter private practice . Moreover, although there is relatively little mobility between private practice and employment by public or private entities, all private practitioners spend at least three years as assistant solicitors employed by firms, and most spend the bulk of their professional lives as partners employing assistant solicitors.graphic shifts described above, thus has had a greater effect on the social integration of the Bar than on that of solicitors. The category of private practitioners is further differentiated in terms of clients served and subject matter handled. Not only is the Bar as a whole more dependent on public funds, but the degree of dependence varies greatly with the barrister s age and specialty, from 1.5 percent of the income of London Chancery and specialist Queen s Counsel to 91.7 percent for London juniors with a criminal practice. Most solicitors, by contrast, earn little or none of their incomes from legal aid; but the 5 percent who specialized in such matters earned a third of the 100 million in public funds paid to solicitors for contentious business in 1980 81. Both branches thus are witnessing the emergence of a dual market, one public and the other private, although the lines of division are very different. Barristers and solicitors also differ in the nature and extent of subject-matter specialization. Indeed, almost all smaller firms perform the same broad range of work, the core of which is conveyancing; in this they resemble the local greengrocer, chemist, or stationer, whose market niche depends on geographic convenience. This difference between the branches presumably reflects the fact that the clients of barristers are solicitors, who can channel work to specialist chambers, whereas the clients of solicitors are laypeople, who must be offered a full range of services in order to attract and retain their business. Therefore, a profession that had only three main divisions at the turn of the century the bench, the Bar, and solicitors now has many more employed barristers and solicitors, private practitioners who rely largely on public funds, and specialist chambers.STRUCTURES OF PRODUCTION When we turn from the social organization of the profession as a whole to the structure of the units within which private practitioners produce services, we find further changes in both size and composition, as well as significant differences between the branches.grown, and their membership has altered.2 principals.5 principals, three-quarters of all firms had fewer than four principals, and 93 percent had fewer than six. Even in 1979, 58 percent of all firms had only one or two principals, and 82 percent had fewer than five. To the extent that this situation reflects the comfortable market niche secured by the conveyancing monopoly, it is likely to change as a result of incursions by licensed conveyancers and the competition that this fosters among solicitors . As the erosion of market control makes it more difficult to extract the customary profits from clients, solicitors will be forced to intensify the extraction of surplus value from subordinates, a development that I discuss further below. One likely trend is the expansion of firms through the creation of suburban branch offices; in 1978, for instance, a third of all firms already had at least two offices, and a tenth had three or more. Furthermore, even if the median productive unit has remained small, a few large firms have emerged since World War II. I found none with more than ten principals prior to the war and only a dozen with as many as five. Yet, five firms had ten or more principals by 1950, twelve had reached this level by 1960, ten had at least twenty principals by 1970, and forty-six are this large today; the largest contains more than 200 solicitors.6 branch offices per firm. The growth of these larger firms is partly a response to the size of their corporate clients and the need to specialize in order to handle more complex and more varied legal problems. But it also is related to changes in the use of subordinated labor, the explanation for which is both historical and economic. Legal executives, as they now were called, made somewhat awkward employees, for they were of the same age and gender as their employers and often from a similar social class, some were just as well trained, and they stayed long enough to expect advancement. First, the role of legal executive has been significantly feminized: almost half of the fellows admitted by the Institute of Legal Executives in 1983 84 were women.by assistant solicitors; although 60 percent of the latter still are male, all are temporary employees, moving either up to partnerships or out to other positions. The enormous increase in the production of solicitors, together with the rule requiring all new entrants to work as employees for three years before setting up on their own or in partnership with another, have provided a constant supply of eager recruits. There has been a concomitant decline in the number of new ILEX fellows since the 1960s and in the numbers of new ILEX students and associates since the 1970s. In the ten years during 1966 to 1976, the number of legal executives remained constant, while the number of articled clerks increased by a third, and the number of assistant solicitors grew almost 90 percent, with the result that the ratio of assistant solicitors to principals rose while the ratio of legal executives to principals fell. These changes in the labor force may have been motivated by considerations of profitability as well as the fact that trainee solicitors were more available and perhaps more docile. The difference between the cost of labor to firms and its price to clients is greatest for assistant solicitors and least for legal executives, with articled clerks falling in between. The profitability of using the labor of assistant solicitors also increases with firm size; so does the ratio of assistant solicitors to principals. In 1976 the average firm with ten principals or more had twice as many assistants per principal as the smaller firms ; in 1984 85, the average firm with sixty principals or more had two and a half times as many assistants per principal as did the firm with twenty to thirty principals. This more intensive and extensive exploitation of subordinated labor undoubtedly is part of the reason for the higher incomes enjoyed by principals in the larger firms. At the same time, only the larger firms can increase at a rate that holds out to assistants the possibility of a partnership whose rewards outweigh the sacrifices of a prolonged apprenticeship. If I am correct in attributing the growth of solicitors firms to the relative availability, pliancy, and profitability of assistant solicitors as subordinates, we can expect further divergence between small and large firms in terms of the labor they employ.The structure of practice at the Bar has changed even more radically, but in different directions. Although most nineteenth century barristers practiced alone, by the late 1950s the average set contained more than seven barristers in London and five in the provinces.is a recent phenomenon: only 5 percent of London sets had more than fifteen barristers in 1965, whereas half did so by 1976. Today, nearly three-fourths of London sets contain at least fifteen barristers , and so do more than half of all provincial sets. Furthermore, unlike solicitors, few barristers still practice in small groups: a quarter of all London sets and half of all provincial sets contained fewer than six barristers in 1961, but now only 3 percent of London sets and 9 percent of provincial sets contain fewer than five barristers. Only 2 of the 336 sets have thirty barristers or more, however, and the largest, with forty-five barristers, does not begin to approach the size of the larger solicitors firms. Chambers have grown for some of the same reasons that impelled the expansion of solicitors firms. Size confers its own prestige; together with internal diversity or balance among the members of a set , it attracts and keeps business. But the central dynamic of growth has been different because of the absence of subordinated labor: barristers in private practice cannot be employed ; and the barristers clerk is an independent contractor, not an employee. Partners in solicitors firms have a profound interest in the clerks they accept for articles and the assistant solicitors they hire: both will be performing work for which the partners are responsible and also are candidates for partnership. Barristers who accept pupils and heads of chambers who fill tenancies undoubtedly are concerned with the quality of those they select, but not for these reasons. Young barristers are acutely affected by the prominence of the older barristers in their chambers and the entrepreneurial skills of their clerk, however, for it is these that attract most of the work the new recruit is likely to obtain. However, the greatest difference between chambers and firms is the role of the barristers clerk. Furthermore, whereas the legal executive is only minimally differentiated from the solicitor in terms of class and training and even may aspire to become a solicitor, the barristers clerk generally comes from a working class background, has no education beyond secondary school, and never becomes a barrister. Despite these differences, the clerk is less subordinated than the legal executive or trainee solicitor and is a petty bourgeois rather than an employee. Barristers clerks wield considerable power over the younger members of chambers: allocating briefs when solicitors have not specified a barrister or when the preferred barrister cannot accept the brief ?or has returned it; and influencing the selection of tenants, particularly from among pupils.Most importantly, whereas solicitors firms have grown, in part, because partners seek to enhance their profits through subordinated labor, the expansion of barristers chambers redounds primarily to the economic benefit of senior clerks. Since most are paid a proportion of the brief fee and each set contains only one senior clerk , the senior clerk s income varies directly with the number of barristers in the set. Consequently, clerks certainly have not been unhappy about the lack of space in the Inns, which has inhibited the fission of sets. Given this space shortage, economies of scale, the self-interest of clerks, the prestige that attaches to growth and size, the commercial advantages of internal differentiation, and the relative absence of economic tensions within chambers because barristers do not share profits, we can expect further expansion. For solicitors, it signifies the intensification of capitalist relations of production and a widening division between the larger firms that have followed this route and the smaller firms that have not. Although the prohibition of partnerships and employment at the Bar precludes this development, the growth of chambers does signify an intensification of hierarchy as greater power accrues to both the head of chambers and the senior clerk. STRATIFICATION Inevitably, the forms of differentiation traced above also structure inequality within the profession. It is essential to distinguish stratification that is relatively permanent, and therefore threatens professional cohesion, from situations where assignment to a stratum is temporary, and mobility can strengthen professional integration. Geography affects the power, wealth, and status of practitioners in both branches, but these differences appear to generate more tension among solicitors, perhaps because the majority are located in the provinces while professional advantages are concentrated in London. The principal division among solicitors is firm size, however, which reflects clients served and functions performed and affects solicitor income and status. Furthermore, recruitment to the larger firms seems to be influenced strongly by the academic institution attended and the degree attained, both of which correlate with background variables such as class. ?This form of stratification is almost certain to intensify with the proliferation of large firms and their continued growth. Although barristers chambers also differ by size and specialty, these variables do not appear to define as strongly the status of individual barristers within them, and there is increasing movement between sets. A very significant exception to both generalizations, however, are the so-called ghetto chambers occupied primarily by black barristers a phenomenon that contradicts the universalistic pretensions of the Bar. Other professional divisions are characterized by varying degrees of mobility. Although barristers still enjoy higher social status than do solicitors, the entry requirements of the two branches have converged, and transfer between them is far easier than it once was, if few avail themselves of the opportunity. Like all professions, those of the law hold out to their members the hope of attaining higher income, status, and power with age. But whereas most articled clerks become assistant solicitors and end as principals, and any solicitor who wishes can play a role in the local, if not the national, law society, the career ladder at the Bar is unusually long and steep, and progress up it far less certain. Not all pupils obtain tenancies; not all fledgling barristers earn their keep and remain in private practice; not all juniors become Queen s Counsel; not all Queen s Counsel become judges; and not all older barristers become heads of chambers or benchers. Whereas the highest decile of solicitors earn only two-thirds more than the median and those forty years or older, only two-thirds more than those under thirty, the highest decile of barristers earn more than twice the median and those forty years or older, almost three times as much as those under thirty. For solicitors, therefore, the problem posed by stratification is to explain the relatively permanent distribution that occurs at the beginning of legal careers: of law students among apprenticeships and of clerks who have completed their articles among law firms and other forms of employment. The early and irrevocable assignment of position within the system of stratification would seem to pose greater problems for the unity of solicitors than the later, more gradual, and apparently more reversible assignment of status to barristers. Stratification among solicitors has not been associated overtly with racism because there are so few blacks , and women have been hired by some of the larger firms in proportion to their representation among law graduates . Although stratification at the Bar may be more fluid than it is among solicitors, the pretense that it simply reflects meritocratic ?principles that success rewards ability and effort thus is more thoroughly undermined by the visible correlation between the stratum attained and the race and gender of the aspirant. PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS In tracing the trajectory of the professional project among barristers and solicitors, I have not yet discussed the instrument through which they pursued their goals the professional association. I will begin by describing the emergence and consolidation of structures for collective action during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before examining their responses to the challenges of the postwar period. THE INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK Barristers entered the nineteenth century as a fully mature profession. Since most of their professional activities occurred in open court, they constantly were subject to the scrutiny of both judges and their fellow barristers. Consequently, it is not surprising that formal structures for self-governance were relatively weak and highly decentralized. Each of the four Inns admitted its own students, called them to the Bar, and was responsible for discipline; however, there is no evidence that they exercised any real scrutiny over admissions or calls or took their disciplinary functions seriously. Consequently, although the Inns cooperated in forming the Council of Legal Education in 1852, the Council had hardly any full-time staff until after World War II and attracted few students.1872 only as a reluctant concession to the example of solicitors and the threat of fusion. During much of the nineteenth century, the circuits may have exercised more significant social control; however, their authority over entry and behavior was entirely informal and their actions even less coordinated than those of the Inns. The only centralized professional association was the Bar Council, created at the end of the century at the initiative of younger barristers who feared that solicitors were threatening their market. More than either the Inns or the circuits, it actively sought to promote the economic interests of barristers and may have helped to formalize such restrictive practices as the two-counsel and two-thirds rules. The Bar Council derived all its financial support from the Inns, however, which were extremely parsimonious, and it enrolled only a small proportion of all barristers. Until well after World War II, therefore, barristers were governed by a miscellany of uncoordinated institutions but actually relied on tradition and informal understandings to control their market and regulate professional behavior. Solicitors present a marked contrast in almost every respect. The eighteenth century Society of Gentlemen Practisers was moribund, and the only vital organizations were local law societies in a few provincial cities. It retained both characteristics throughout the nineteenth century: London solicitors dominated ; and fifty years after its inception only 25 percent of practitioners had joined. Provincial solicitors continued to invest primary loyalty in their local law societies, which formed federations that competed with the national organization until well into the twentieth century.But even if the institutional structure was flawed, the Law Society energetically mobilized whatever resources it possessed to pursue the professional project.tered these, the Law Society soon took over. Solicitors were less successful in controlling production by producers, for the courts, rather than the Society, regulated fees and demonstrated their solicitude for the public interest by establishing maxima rather than minima. In response, the Law Society promulgated a practice rule prohibiting fee cutting and encouraged local law societies to set minimum fees at or near the judicial maxima. Second, solicitors sought to persuade the courts to hand over disciplinary powers. The Society was authorized to present charges of misconduct to the Supreme Court in 1873, to conduct a preliminary hearing in 1888, and finally to constitute the disciplinary tribunal in 1919, although solicitors still could seek judicial review. Unlike barristers, solicitors did not rely on traditional conventions about proper behavior; ethical precepts were imbodied in judicial decisions and, after the Law Society obtained statutory authority in 1933, in its practice rules. Third, the Law Society responded to a problem that uniquely threatened the collective status of solicitors financial misconduct. In response, the Law Society successfully sought legislation making such conduct criminal; five years later it secured the right to suspend a practicing certificate on the same ground and required newly qualified solicitors to pass an examination in accounting. In 1935, under legislative compulsion, it required solicitors to keep and report client accounts , and in 1942 it compelled solicitors to contribute to the compensation fund. Whereas barristers preserved their traditional decentralized institutions and relied heavily on informal control, solicitors thus created a new central institution that constantly sought to expand its formal control. POSTWAR CHALLENGES The changes the legal profession has experienced since World War II have induced some convergence in the structures and processes of governance in the two branches, but significant differences remain. The Bar, as we saw, has become more heterogeneous in terms of race and gender, more youthful, and more dispersed ; however, governance of the Inns hardly has changed in response.sented 90 percent of the practicing Bar. Yet a few may be able to retain some autonomy from informal influences because they have physically isolated themselves from the Inns or because their members, head, and clerk are predominately black, female, youthful, or politically dissident. The greatest institutional transformation in the governance of barristers was the creation of the Senate of the Inns of Court and the Bar in 1966. Its governance still is not much more representative than that of the Inns , however, for there are only three women and no blacks in the Senate. Furthermore, within that moiety of all barristers who are employed, probably no more than half belong to the Senate, and only 8 serve on its governing body of more than 100. In addition, although the Senate has centralized the disciplinary powers previously exercised by the four Inns, the new structure like all forms of professional self-regulation seems intended more to shield barristers from criticism than to change behavior or punish misconduct. Only 3 percent of complaints between 1968 and 1982 led to disbarment, and only I percent led to suspension; the other 96 percent resulted in no significant penalty. In addition to these institutional changes in its structures of governance, the Senate formalized the substantive rules of ethics by promulgating the first Code of Conduct in 1980. Furthermore, dictum in a 1969 case exposing barristers to the threat of malpractice liability for noncontentious activities has led insurers to settle several claims and convinced the Senate to require barristers to carry professional indemnity insurance. Barristers today thus operate under a structure of formal, centralized self-regulation and the specter of increasing external regulation a situation similar to that of prewar solicitors. The Law Society also has had to cope with growing diversity in the background of solicitors, the functions that they perform, and the structures ?within which they practice. Although almost all private practitioners now belong to the Society, its governing council is not remotely representative of the general membership. Women presently hold more than 10 percent of practicing certificates and constitute more than 40 percent of newly admitted solicitors, but the first woman was appointed to the seventy-person council only in 1977. Nearly one out of every ten solicitors is a sole practitioner, but there are none on the council; two-partner firms contain 16 percent of all principals, but such principals represent only 4 percent of council members.This disenfranchisement not only has caused tension and apathy within the Society but also has led to the emergence and growth of rival organizations. The creation of the British Legal Association in the 1960s and its survival for two decades reflects the persistent dissatisfaction of younger solicitors, provincial solicitors, and solo and small firm practitioners. Large firm principals, although still a minority, are likely to insist on governing their own domain, resisting interference by professional associations. At the other end of the status hierarchy, articled clerks, assistant solicitors, and junior employees in government or industry may prefer trade unionism to professionalism. That hallmark of a profession the capacity to act collectively through a single organization which solicitors struggled to attain during the nineteenth century, appears to be fragmenting as the interests of discrete and sometimes antagonistic segments are expressed through forms that may be antithetical to professionalism. The institutions of self-regulation created by the Law Society in the early twentieth century have been strained by postwar changes. Clients also are reluctant to make accusations; only a third of those with grievances complained to anyone, and only 6 percent of complainants addressed the Law Society. Even so, there are more than five times as many complaints per solicitor as there are for each barrister, probably because solicitors have so much more client contact.Society discipline, like that of the Senate, exculpates far more than it punishes. More than two-thirds of all complaints are found unjustified by the investigative body , and others are terminated with only a reprimand. In those cases sent to the Disciplinary Tribunal, less than half of the solicitors are struck from the roll or suspended. In summary, the Society punished less than I percent of all solicitors who were the object of complaints between 1973 and 1979. Public dissatisfaction with this record, together with periodic scandals, have led the Society to appoint lay members to the Disciplinary Tribunal, establish a Lay Observer to hear complaints about the disciplinary process, and, most recently, add laypersons to the Professional Purposes Committee ; however, these reforms appear to have achieved neither a significant voice for the laity nor the restoration of public confidence. Self-regulation has been threatened from other directions as well. First, although the Society hired a staff to investigate solicitor accounts in 1945 and has enlarged it steadily, the compensation fund has had to make increasingly greater payments to the clients of defaulting solicitors, rising from about 100,000 a year in the 1960s to nearly 2,000,000 in 1984 an increase that far outstrips the combined effect of inflation and the growth of the profession. Given the sums involved, it is not clear how long the Law Society can preserve this as an ex gratia scheme rather than a legal liability. In the 1960s, only about half of all solicitors carried malpractice insurance, and less than 10 percent were sued each year. The Law Society required insurance in 1976, and one index of the greater frequency, magnitude, and success of malpractice claims is the fact that premiums doubled in the next four years. Furthermore, the apportionment of the Law Society s master premium among solicitors recently became a point of bitter contention between the larger City firms and small firms and sole practitioners, leading to an upsurge in support for the position of the British Legal Association. Competence increasingly is evaluated by the courts rather than the Law Society, therefore, and there is a real danger that the latter also will lose some or all of its authority to punish ethical violations and to deal with financial misconduct. THE TRAJECTORY OF PROFESSIONALISM BARRISTERS AND SOLICITORS AS ALTERNATIVE MODELS The history of barristers and solicitors during the last two centuries offers unparalleled insights into the trajectory of professionalism.branches must resolve similar prob