The Poor Had No Lawyers

The Poor Had No Lawyers PDF Author: Andy Wightman
Publisher: Birlinn
ISBN: 0857900765
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
New and Updated Edition Who owns Scotland? How did they get it? What happened to all the common land in Scotland? Has the Scottish Parliament made any difference? Can we get our common good land back? In this book, Andy Wightman updates the statistics of landownership in Scotland and explores how and why landowners got their hands on the millions of acres of land that were once held in common. He tells the untold story of how Scotland's legal establishment and politicians managed to appropriate land through legal fixes. Have attempts to redistribute this power more equitably made any difference, and what are the full implications of the recent debt-fuelled housing bubble, the Smith Commission and the new Scottish Government's proposals on land reform? For all those with an interest in urban and rural land in Scotland, this updated edition of The Poor Had No Lawyers provides a fascinating analysis of one the most important political questions in Scotland.

POOR HAD NO LAWYERS

POOR HAD NO LAWYERS PDF Author: ANDY. WIGHTMAN
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781780278834
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


No Contest

No Contest PDF Author: Ralph Nader
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0375752587
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
The legal rights of Americans are threatened as never before. In No Contest, Ralph Nader and Wesley J. Smith reveal how power lawyers--Kenneth Starr perhaps the most notorious among them--misuse and manipulate the law at the expense of fairness and equity. Nader and Smith document how corporate lawyers File baseless lawsuits Use court secrecy to their unfair advantage Engage in billing fraud Nader and Smith sound the warning that this system-wide abuse is eroding our basic legal rights, and propose a positive, commonsense vision of what should be done to reverse the corporate-inspired corruption of civil justice. Timely, incisive, and highly readable, this is a book for all citizens who believe that prompt access to justice is the backbone of democracy, and a precious right to be reclaimed.

First Thing We Do, Let's Deregulate All the Lawyers

First Thing We Do, Let's Deregulate All the Lawyers PDF Author: Clifford Winston
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0815721919
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
Not many Americans think of the legal profession as a monopoly, but it is. Abraham Lincoln, who practiced law for nearly twenty-five years, would likely not have been allowed to practice today. Without a law degree from an American Bar Association–sanctioned institution, a would-be lawyer is allowed to practice law in only a few states. ABA regulations also prevent even licensed lawyers who work for firms that are not owned and managed by lawyers from providing legal services. At the same time, a slate of government policies has increased the demand for lawyers' services. Basic economics suggests that those entry barriers and restrictions combined with government-induced demand for lawyers will continue to drive the price of legal services even higher. Clifford Winston, Robert Crandall, and Vikram Maheshri argue that these increased costs cannot be economically justified. They create significant social costs, hamper innovation, misallocate the nation's labor resources, and create socially perverse incentives. In the end, attorneys support inefficient policies that preserve and enhance their own wealth, to the detriment of the general population. To fix this situation, the authors propose a novel solution: deregulation of the legal profession. Lowering the barriers to entry will force lawyers to compete more intensely with each other and to face competition from nonlawyers and firms that are not owned and managed by lawyers. The book provides a much-needed analysis of why legal costs are so high and how they can be reduced without sacrificing the quality of legal services.

The Trouble with Lawyers

The Trouble with Lawyers PDF Author: Deborah L. Rhode
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190217227
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
By any measure, the law as a profession is in serious trouble. Americans' trust in lawyers is at a low, and many members of the profession wish they had chosen a different path. Law schools, with their endlessly rising tuitions, are churning out too many graduates for the jobs available. Yet despite the glut of lawyers, the United States ranks 67th (tied with Uganda) of 97 countries in access to justice and affordability of legal services. The upper echelons of the legal establishment remain heavily white and male. Most problematic of all, the professional organizations that could help remedy these concerns instead jealously protect their prerogatives, stifling necessary innovation and failing to hold practitioners accountable. Deborah Rhode's The Trouble with Lawyers is a comprehensive account of the challenges facing the American bar. She examines how the problems have affected (and originated within) law schools, firms, and governance institutions like bar associations; the impact on the justice system and access to lawyers for the poor; and the profession's underlying difficulties with diversity. She uncovers the structural problems, from the tyranny of law school rankings and billable hours to the lack of accountability and innovation built into legal governance-all of which do a disservice to lawyers, their clients, and the public. The Trouble with Lawyers is a clear call to fix a profession that has gone badly off the rails, and a source of innovative responses.

Usual Cruelty

Usual Cruelty PDF Author: Alec Karakatsanis
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620975289
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
From an award-winning civil rights lawyer, a profound challenge to our society's normalization of the caging of human beings, and the role of the legal profession in perpetuating it Alec Karakatsanis is interested in what we choose to punish. For example, it is a crime in most of America for poor people to wager in the streets over dice; dice-wagerers can be seized, searched, have their assets forfeited, and be locked in cages. It's perfectly fine, by contrast, for people to wager over international currencies, mortgages, or the global supply of wheat; wheat-wagerers become names on the wings of hospitals and museums. He is also troubled by how the legal system works when it is trying to punish people. The bail system, for example, is meant to ensure that people return for court dates. But it has morphed into a way to lock up poor people who have not been convicted of anything. He's so concerned about this that he has personally sued court systems across the country, resulting in literally tens of thousands of people being released from jail when their money bail was found to be unconstitutional. Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings—an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color and for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively, wildly successfully, challenging it.

How Can You Represent Those People?

How Can You Represent Those People? PDF Author: A. Smith
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137311959
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
How Can You Represent Those People? is the first-ever collection of essays offering a response to the 'Cocktail Party Question' asked of every criminal lawyer. A must-read for anyone interested in race, poverty, crime, punishment, and what makes lawyers tick.

Model Rules of Professional Conduct

Model Rules of Professional Conduct PDF Author: American Bar Association. House of Delegates
Publisher: American Bar Association
ISBN: 9781590318737
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.

Typography for Lawyers

Typography for Lawyers PDF Author: Matthew Butterick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781598392623
Category : Desktop publishing
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Originally released to great acclaim in 2010, Typography for Lawyers was the first guide to the essentials of typography aimed specifically at lawyers. Author Matthew Butterick, an attorney and Harvard-trained typographer, dispelled the myth that legal documents are incompatible with excellent typography. Butterick explained how to get professional results with the tools you already have quickly and easily. Revised and updated & the second edition includes: new topics such as email, footnotes, alternate figures, and OpenType features; avice for presentations, contracts, grids of numbers, and court opinions; technical tips covering the newest versions of Word and WordPerfect for Windows and OS X; new font recommendations, including two that are free; new essays on the font copyrights, screen-reading considerations, and typographic disputes that have reached the courts; a refreshed layout, featuring type features designed by the author."--from Amazon.com website.

Lady Justice

Lady Justice PDF Author: Dahlia Lithwick
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525561404
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Winner of the LA Times Book Prize in Current Interest An instant New York Times Bestseller! “Stirring…Lithwick’s approach, interweaving interviews with legal commentary, allows her subjects to shine...Inspiring.”—New York Times Book Review “In Dahlia Lithwick’s urgent, engaging Lady Justice, Dobbs serves as a devastating bookend to a story that begins in hope.”—Boston Globe Dahlia Lithwick, one of the nation’s foremost legal commentators, tells the gripping and heroic story of the women lawyers who fought the racism, sexism, and xenophobia of Donald Trump’s presidency—and won After the sudden shock of Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, many Americans felt lost and uncertain. It was clear he and his administration were going to pursue a series of retrograde, devastating policies. What could be done? Immediately, women lawyers all around the country, independently of each other, sprang into action, and they had a common goal: they weren’t going to stand by in the face of injustice, while Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the Republican party did everything in their power to remake the judiciary in their own conservative image. Over the next four years, the women worked tirelessly to hold the line against the most chaotic and malign presidency in living memory. There was Sally Yates, the acting attorney general of the United States, who refused to sign off on the Muslim travel ban. And Becca Heller, the founder of a refugee assistance program who brought the fight over the travel ban to the airports. And Roberta Kaplan, the famed commercial litigator, who sued the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. And, of course, Stacey Abrams, whose efforts to protect the voting rights of millions of Georgians may well have been what won the Senate for the Democrats in 2020. These are just a handful of the stories Lithwick dramatizes in thrilling detail to tell a brand-new and deeply inspiring account of the Trump years. With unparalleled access to her subjects, she has written a luminous book, not about the villains of the Trump years, but about the heroes. And as the country confronts the news that the Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-appointed justices, will soon overturn Roe v. Wade, Lithwick shines a light on not only the major consequences of such a decision, but issues a clarion call to all who might, like the women in this book, feel the urgency to join the fight. A celebration of the tireless efforts, legal ingenuity, and indefatigable spirit of the women whose work all too often went unrecognized at the time, Lady Justice is destined to be treasured and passed from hand to hand for generations to come, not just among lawyers and law students, but among all optimistic and hopeful Americans.