【作者】埃贝尔,R.L.
【内容提要】
Professions are historically specific institutions for organizing the production and distribution of services. American lawyers constructed the contemporary legal profession between the 1870s and the 1950s by forming local, state, and national bar associations through which they sought, with considerable success, to control the production of and by producers of legal services. In the last two decades, these structures of control have significantly eroded. Lawyers exerted no restraint over the threefold increase in law students since the early 1960s or the changes in the composition of that student body. Restrictive practices taken for granted for half a century have been summarily eliminated by judicial decisions and executive action.To the extent that lawyers have responded by seeking to create new demand, they run the risk of intensifying competition, becoming more dependent on the state, and organizing hitherto atomistic consumers into collectivities that can challenge professional dominance……