Спереводом(( technically there is no such thing as an “american lawyer”: every state admits its own, and a lawyer licensed to practice in florida is strictly speaking a layperson as far as alabama or alaska is concerned. nonetheless, in the aggregate, this is a vast army of lawtrained men and women. the profession is, and always has been, quite diverse. there are many legal worlds. to begin with, there is the world of the big firm. these big firms recruit their lawyers, by and large, from the “national” law schools – with big reputations and long traditions, like harvard and yale. we know in general what the work is: it includes securities law, antitrust law, bond issues, mergers, tax work, international trade. in both big and little firms, up to half the work could be described as “litigation”. another staple of law practice is real estate: buying and selling houses or concluding elaborate deals for shopping centers, suburban developments, and office buildings, or converting luxury apartments into condominiums. estate work is also common to big firms and little firms alike. big firms handle these affairs for captains of industry and for great old families. middle-sized do the same for the medium-rich – manufacturers of plastic novelties, owners of restaurants, car-wash companies, apartment buildings. small-town lawyers and solo practitioners handle farm estates. and so on. some branches of practice do tend toward specialization. there are lawyers who work on port trade, on chartering ships, on show business (“entertainment law”), on trademarks and copyrights. however, few lawyers are totally specialized. big-firm lawyers cover many fields and many problems. but there are areas they definitely do not touch. one is divorce. it is the lawyers in smallish firms and in law clinics, and the solos, who handle “one-shot” clients – couples who want a divorce, victims of car crashes, people arrested for drunk driving. some lawyers with one-shot clients struggle to make ends meet; others earn heaps of money. since the early nineteenth century, law has been a prominent way “to get ahead” in the society. for much of american history, a lawyer meant “white male.” black lawyers were rare birds in american history. not a single woman was admitted to the bar before the 1870s. indeed, when women tried to break into this all-male club, they met resistance and reluctance, to say the least. opinions changed, but slowly and grudgingly. equality of opportunity is not an easy goal to achieve, especially with regard to barriers of class. the cost of legal education is one of these barriers. lawyers tend to come from the families of businessmen, teachers, professionals; they are not sons of grocery clerks or coal miners’ daughters. over 73 percent of the practicing lawyers in chicago came from “solidly middle-class or upper-middle-class-homes,” far more than if lawyers were selected from chicago families at random. many came from lawyerly or professional backgrounds not from working-class backgrounds. there are law schools in every major city and in almost every state, alaska is one of the few that lacks this modern amenity. these law schools are both different from each other and much the same. they are remarkably similar in curriculum and method. they also tend to impose the same general requirements: a college degree, and the law school admission test (lsat). but law schools are quite different in prestige, money and power – and in quality of faculty and students. the stronger older schools are able to “skim off the cream”. harvard, yale, berkley, and chicago can afford huge research libraries; small schools cannot. lawyers, like americans in general, are joiners. they are united into a strong, permanent organization – the american bar association, the aba, in short. there are also state, county, and city bar associations. but the aba is still not an association of all american lawyers. no one has to join it though it has a huge membership. law and lawyers are expensive. many people who want or need a lawyer have trouble paying the price. but the state provides a lawyer, free of charge “public defenders”, to anyone accused of a serious crime who cannot afford to pay on his own. for civil cases, the situation is more complicated. a few lawyers have always made it a practice to do some work free for poor clients. there are now a number of law firms organized for the “public interest”.
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Спереводом(( technically there is no such thing as an “american lawyer”: every state admits its own...
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