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Background: While health advocacy is an established physician role, most of the educational attention to advocacy has been at the individual patient level. Public advocacy—efforts to effect change at the level of communities, populations or society—remains a poorly defined concept whose educational foundation is underdeveloped. To enrich our understanding of public advocacy, we explored how professionals in two disciplines—medicine and law—have approached its tasks and experienced its challenges. Methods: Using constructivist grounded theory, we interviewed 18 professionals (nine physicians, eight lawyers and one qualified in both disciplines) who engage in public advocacy. We used constant comparison throughout an iterative process of data collection and analysis to develop an understanding of what it means to be a professional in the public domain. Results: Public advocacy work occurs at the intersection of personal and professional identities. Lawyers perceived public advocacy as an embedded element of their professional identity, while physicians more often viewed it as outside their core professional scope. Nonetheless, professional identity influenced how both groups conducted their work. Physicians were more likely to draw on professional attitudes (e.g. their orientation towards evidence and their trusted social position), while lawyers were more likely to draw on professional skills (e.g. building an argument and litigating test cases). The work requires courage and often demands that individuals tolerate personal and professional risk. Conclusion: While medicine has enshrined advocacy in its competency frameworks, it is the legal profession whose practitioners more fully embrace advocacy as intrinsic to professional identity, suggesting that roles are difficult to engineer or impose. Collaboration across public‐facing professions like medicine and law creates opportunities to reimagine public advocacy, to identify the skills required to do it well and to refresh educational strategies. Public advocacy is high‐stakes work. This paper explores how doctors and lawyers navigate this often‐risky activity and speculates on what medicine might learn from law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding more about the discharge of care orders is vital—whether a care order remains in place has significant implications for children and their families and for local authorities. While there has been comprehensive research about the process and outcomes of care proceedings, much less is known about the discharge of care orders—particularly how, why and when care orders are ended and the differences between applications that are granted and those that are not. The present study combined data from an anonymized administrative data on discharge applications, a detailed analysis of children's e‐records and qualitative interviews with family justice professionals to create the first detailed profile of discharge applications across England and Wales. This paper reports, for the first time, the number of discharge applications and outcomes across England and Wales, highlighting regional as well as between‐country variation. Drawing on data from children's e‐records and interviews with professionals, highlighting how and why local authorities are more likely to submit discharge applications, and to have applications granted, than parents. Recommendations are made for how to adapt professional practice and policy around discharge applications to better meet the needs of children and families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recognising the importance of emotions for careers, researchers rarely explore how career‐related practices invoke emotions and the implications for professionals' career aspirations and behaviours. Drawing on 50 interviews with lawyers on the partner track and human resource (HR) professionals, we develop the concept of an emotions career. The emotions career consists of four stages, each characterised by different primary emotions and socio‐emotional dynamics. We find that career practices and social interactions elicit emotions that regulate professionals' career aspirations and trajectories. Thus, professionals become emotionally invested in their careers, which in turn contributes to the maintenance of existing career systems. To better support professionals, we suggest that HR practitioners develop greater awareness of the emotional dynamics associated with careers and engage in career conversations, while organisational leaders should, collectively, consider ways to challenge negative perceptions of alternative career paths, generating more diverse thinking about careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel 'legal process' analysis to examine labour market institutions' role in addressing violations of migrants' labour rights in Indonesia. Examining 92 labour disputes and conducting qualitative interviews with stakeholders, the study explores Indonesia's primary labour market institutions' effectiveness in safeguarding migrants' rights. Systemic shortcomings within Indonesia's labour market institutions are revealed, indicating their limited capacity to protect migrants' labour rights effectively. Qualitative interviews provide insights into various foci and disconnects contributing to institutional failures. Calling attention to the role of the state, this study identifies 'institutional fixes' that facilitate migrant rights protection, such as the assistance provided by private lawyers. It argues for shifting focus from 'migrant exceptionalism' to acknowledging migrants' experiences within labour market institutions as workers. This study contributes to understanding migrant labour governance in Indonesia, emphasizing the need to address institutional failures and advocate for comprehensive reforms to protect migrants' rights effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a framework to understand the legal profession's participation in providing services to indigent clients. Our theory is based on two factors: whether lawyers have successful practices, and whether the legal aid delivered to indigent clients is free or below market price. Pro bono signals moral high ground in the profession. Conversely, a regime in which legal assistance is provided at a discounted market price ("low bono"), an under‐explored area in the literature, attracts less competitive attorneys, and doing legal aid cases is perceived as signifying incompetence in one's professional capacity. Using a unique, comprehensive data set on all legal aid lawyers in Taiwan (nearly 4000), two nationwide attorney surveys, and 143 in‐depth interviews with practicing lawyers across the country, we offer the first comprehensive empirical analysis of legal aid lawyers and explain that the design of a legal aid regime attracts lawyers of different hemispheres into the endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosecutors are the key decision‐makers when it comes to plea bargaining, which is responsible for the resolution of about 90% of criminal cases. We distributed a mixed‐method survey to a national sample of 180 prosecutors to ask about their key considerations when initiating and prosecuting a criminal case. Additionally, the survey asked prosecutors to provide any information they wanted to share regarding plea bargaining. We then conducted a qualitative content analysis to comprehensively identify the factors the prosecutors discussed. We found several factors that prosecutors take into consideration when starting to evaluate a criminal case: attributes of the criminal defendant (e.g., criminal history), victim input (e.g., victim wishes), and factors specific to the case (e.g., evidence strength). Further, when asked if they would like to share anything regarding plea bargaining, some prosecutors stressed the necessity of the plea system, some shared their punishment orientations, and others discussed how they determine punishment on a case‐by‐case basis. Overall, prosecutors tended to stress criminal history as largely influential in their plea decision‐making. This study provides insight into prosecutorial plea bargain decision‐making while providing opportunity for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Victims of child sexual abuse (CSA) in criminal proceedings face a range of stress factors. In response to this, collaboration between criminal justice and child protection professionals has been established both legally and informally, such as in the newly established Childhood Houses in Germany, which follow the model of the Scandinavian Barnahus to reduce stress and prevent revictimisation. This study intends to identify facilitating and inhibiting factors in the collaboration between the child protection and criminal justice systems in cases of CSA in Germany. Twenty‐eight qualitative interviews with experts from child protection, like counselling centre employees (n = 5), psychosocial court supporters (n = 5) and youth welfare office workers (n = 5), and the criminal justice system, like prosecutors (n = 5), police officers (n = 5) and attorneys (n = 3). The interviews are structured by a questionnaire and analysed using Kuckartz's method of qualitative content analysis (QCA). Findings show that key factors like information flow, assessments of collaboration partners, uncertainties about laws and actors' perspectives on reporting and networking determine the success or failure of interagency collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Bodyguards of Lies: Lawyers' Power and Professional Responsibility" is a book that explores the role of lawyers in covering up the truth and guarding the lies of their clients. It discusses real and fictional examples, such as the Enron bankruptcy case, and examines issues like non-disclosure agreements and plea bargaining. The author compares the positions of the US, England and Wales, and Canada on representing confessed and lying clients, and explores the ethical dilemmas faced by lawyers. The book emphasizes the importance of conscience, ethical judgment, and professional responsibility in the legal profession. [Extracted from the article]

Access to justice depends on the ability of the person who is alleging a breach of human rights to establish to a credible extent the facts of the case. Where the individual is unable to provide supporting documentation about the facts, the claims are likely to be found inadmissible, or at least the defendant's lawyers are likely to seek to have the case dismissed on the basis of no case to answer. The transnational nature of state authorities' violence in external border controls (border violence) complicates the ability of victims to establish what has actually happened. Indeed, victims are often on one side of the border and those seeking to assist them on the other, while border police themselves are most reluctant to assist in establishing facts which may result in liability for themselves. This article examines how the EU can establish effective monitoring mechanisms with the competence to investigate allegations of state agencies' border violence building on existing structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the types of work that jurists have historically undertaken and maps how opportunities for legal practice have been shaped by social origins across three centuries: after constitutional independence in the mid‐1800s, during industrial capitalism in the mid‐1900s, and at present‐day advanced capitalism. I analyze historical archive data on law graduates from the 19th and 20th centuries in combination with administrative registry data from the 1990s onwards and employ correspondence analysis to explore how social backgrounds shape careers, considering transformations in class structures and the changing significance of juridical expertise over time. Within each period, jurists have served in very different roles including those that craft and cater to the institutional make‐up of the state and the markets. My analysis shows that the impact of social origin on occupational outcomes has undergone significant changes, mirroring shifts in the broader social structure; from the importance of legal and political capital (within regional jurisdictions) in the 19th century to the significance of economic capital as the main structuring principle, but also a greater significance of cultural capital, in contemporary times. The ability to reach the most powerful positions among law graduates—within the polity in the 19th century, and the economy in the 21st century—has been differently structured by origins. I argue that expansion of the student body, the declining standing of the university, and heightened differentiation of the social structure and the juridical field have made intimate familiarity with the business world pivotal for forging mutually beneficial alliances between jurists and the increasingly dominant capitalist class. Today, a select group of jurists have managed to connect with and contribute to the rising power of private capital. Thus, the historical tale of jurists cannot be accurately captured by notions of uniform descent from national power structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bibliometric‐enhanced information retrieval uses bibliometrics (e.g., citations) to improve ranking algorithms. Using a data‐driven approach, this article describes the development of a bibliometric‐enhanced ranking algorithm for legal information retrieval, and the evaluation thereof. We statistically analyze the correlation between usage of documents and citations over time, using data from a commercial legal search engine. We then propose a bibliometric boost function that combines usage of documents with citation counts. The core of this function is an impact variable based on usage and citations that increases in influence as citations and usage counts become more reliable over time. We evaluate our ranking function by comparing search sessions before and after the introduction of the new ranking in the search engine. Using a cost model applied to 129,571 sessions before and 143,864 sessions after the intervention, we show that our bibliometric‐enhanced ranking algorithm reduces the time of a search session of legal professionals by 2 to 3% on average for use cases other than known‐item retrieval or updating behavior. Given the high hourly tariff of legal professionals and the limited time they can spend on research, this is expected to lead to increased efficiency, especially for users with extremely long search sessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do prisoners' rights matter? This paper examines this question through a social‐legal study of one of the most controversial prisoners' rights issues of recent decades: prisoner voting. Thousands of prisoners are legally eligible to vote in the United Kingdom. Drawing on a survey of 134 electoral administrators, we explore whether they are exercising that right and the potential barriers to electoral participation which they face. We find that participation among eligible prisoners is extremely low. Further, we identify problems in the administration of prisoner voting rights which may prevent eligible prisoners from voting. In light of these findings, we argue that the scale of prisoner disenfranchisement is likely to be graver than previously thought and open to future legal challenge. The prisoner voting example provides a cautionary tale of the limitations of prisoner rights, both as a measure of existing prison conditions and as tools for transforming them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the assumptions of viability of international climate litigation. While international climate litigation has recently gained momentum, this article calls for a tempering of expectations on two bases. First, the climate problem is highly polycentric—more so than other environmental problems encountered by international courts. Second, international courts have structural limitations that make it difficult for them to address such highly polycentric problems. While international courts can deal with other environmental problems by balancing the interest of the parties involved, this approach is incongruous with the highly polycentric climate problem. This article demonstrates that international courts may insist upon deploying the same methods in international climate litigation. To do so, the article looks at the basis of the legitimacy of the work of international courts and reassesses their official functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human rights‐based climate litigation cases have become increasingly prominent over the past decade. While absolute numbers of these cases are still relatively low, they have attracted significant praise and scrutiny, both from the standpoint of the media and the academy. However, while there is a large body of scholarly literature on these rights‐based climate cases, relatively little qualitative research has focused on the actors bringing these claims before the court. This article uses qualitative socio‐legal research methods to examine how lawyers and activists in the climate litigation space think about these cases, their strategies and their reasons for using human rights‐based arguments to address the climate crisis. By foregrounding these actors and their voices, this article tells the story of the human rights‐based climate litigation movement and how it came together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accessible summary: Many day centres in Sweden closed during the COVID‐19 pandemic.Some day centres provided online activities like FaceTime calls and short films instead.This was to help people keep in touch.Some people with intellectual disabilities also got involved in making films when lockdown lifted.People with intellectual disabilities and staff learned a lot about doing things online and using technology. It would be good to keep this going. Background: The lockdown of a day centre for individuals with intellectual disabilities led to digital activities instead of traditional physical presence. Method: This study is based on 17 interviews with staff of a day centre, directors of day centres and support persons. Findings: The purpose of the digital activities was to overcome physical distance and to create "social connectedness" with service users at a day centre. Emphasis was placed on recognisability to meet the needs of the service users. When the lockdown was lifted, service users were included in the production of digital artefacts. There were also obstacles to digitalisation: some service users had no access to Internet or tablets at home, some lawyers forbid the use of common digital programmes and service users were denied being visible on social media, support persons lacked digital competence and were reluctant to digital activities. Conclusions: The experiences of digital activities including coproduction of films made individuals with intellectual disabilities active and visible on social media. This might facilitate the possibilities for future digital inclusion in society. The support from staff at the sheltered accommodations was vital and when it succeeded it promoted a more holistic approach to the service users' everyday lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a vast majority of disputes, settlement is superior to litigation, which involves uncertainty, legal fees, and opportunity cost. Unnecessary litigation also causes judicial backlog, wastes resources, and increases societal conflict. Major contributors to the lack of settlement are intransigent litigants who harbor overoptimistic predictions of litigation outcomes, even though they are looking at identical facts and applicable law. A study (N = 166) found significant myside bias in the participants' predictions of a judicial award (claimants' advisers expected awards that were 69% higher than defendants' advisers) and in their evaluation of arguments (both sides thought the arguments supporting their side were 30% more convincing than the arguments supporting their counterparty). Debiasing interventions--alerting to the myside bias, considering the perspective of the counterparty and dialectical bootstrapping--reduced the bias but did not eliminate it. Exploratory investigation indicated that a large proportion of advisers exhibited naïve realism and bias blind spot, and that cognitive reflection provided a limited measure of resistance to myside bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies typically find that lawyers have high job satisfaction and that women are not less satisfied than are men. But racial differences as well as gender differences by race or ethnicity in satisfaction may be masked because most lawyers identify as racially White. To examine whether job satisfaction differs by race and whether gender and race/ethnicity have an intersectional relation to job satisfaction, I use data on nearly 13,000 law graduates drawn from six waves of the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG) conducted between 2003 and 2019. The NSCG uniquely provides a large enough sample to examine intersectionality in job satisfaction of law graduates as well as to compare satisfaction of lawyers to those employed in other occupations. Job satisfaction is strikingly low among Black women and Asian women law graduates. Asian women lawyers have satisfaction similar to White men lawyers but substantially lower satisfaction if not employed as a lawyer. Black women have substantially lower satisfaction in either employment situation. The lower satisfaction of Asian and Black women law graduates is not due to differences in personal characteristics, family status or background, job characteristics, or differences in values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Increased social integration of individuals with intellectual disabilities or autism could may raise their likelihood of interacting with justice system and legal staff. Aims: The present article aimed to determine the perceptions of the legal support staff about the individuals with intellectual disabilities or autism. Materials and Methods: In the study, conducted with the phenomenological method, the views of 15 legal support staff were obtained. The study reported what participants perceived and examined whether participants had an accurate understanding of the experiences/support needs of people with intellectual disabilities/autism. The data were analysed with content analysis. Results: Three themes were determined: (1) Experience of interview with an individual with intellectual disabilities/autism, (2) attitudes of judges, lawyers and other staff, and (3) abuse/trauma. Discussion: Findings are consistent with literature. Individuals with intellectual disabilities/autism have problems in expressing themselves, also staff do not know them, do not know their features. Studies show that staff often do not know what to do in these interviews. Conclusion: Based on the participant perspectives, it was determined that individuals with intellectual disabilities/autism experienced self‐expression problems, interviewees did not understand children/individuals with intellectual disabilities or autism and could exhibit negative attitudes, the children could be abused and traumatised during judicial processes, they were more prone to abuse when compared to their peers, they could be involved in certain events more frequently and could be pushed to crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In I Lliuya v RWE i , the claimant relies upon §1004 German Civil Code, a provision that belongs in the system of the German Civil Code to nuisance law, I not i to the law of torts. Lastly, it should be noted that nuisance law in accordance with §1004 Civil Code does not provide for considerations such as Mayer's suggestion that 'Lliuya himself might have benefitted indirectly from the economic impact of the economic development generated by RWE and other emission-intensive activities'. [Extracted from the article]

I defend a metalinguistic account of Mates's puzzle: sentences where synonymous expressions cannot be substituted salva veritate. If Andrea thinks that attorneys are different from lawyers, and she thinks that Fiona is the former but not the latter, we may hesitate to substitute 'lawyer' for 'attorney' in 'Andrea believes that Fiona is an attorney', even though 'lawyer' and 'attorney' are synonymous. I argue that these sentences report de re beliefs about linguistic expressions, thereby blocking such substitutions, and I offer a compositional derivation of their meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family courts have been criticized for failing their core mission of rehabilitating families. Structural inequalities embedded in the family court system, combined with the role of adversarial judges and resource constraints, have contributed to the creation of a problematic environment for parents and families. In this paper, we examine the strategies that legal teams (attorneys, legal social workers and parent advocates) employ to serve child welfare‐involved parents in navigating this complex system. Interviews were conducted with 32 participants employed by public defender organizations in a large Northeastern city. We called on thematic analysis to identify three distinct themes: (1) Keeping the Lines of Communication Open (the importance of regular communication between parents and attorneys); (2) Strategic Use of Parent Voice (the intentionality behind when and how parents should speak directly to the judge); and (3) Parents as Chameleons (the grooming of parents to meet certain judicial ideals of parenthood). We identified several strategies to empower child welfare involved parents as they pursue legal permanency for their children: (a) ameliorating communication barriers between parents and their legal team members; (b) preparing parents to amplify their voices in the courtroom; and (c) using more general language to co‐manage parental appearance and presentation. Key points for the family court community: The challenges of the family court system have been widely documented but less is known about how attorneys, social workers, and parent advocates operate in the family court setting and how they seek to work cooperatively with their clients.This study features the voices of these professionals as they articulate the challenges of operating within the family court system and the strategies that they have adopted to guide their clients through it.Qualitative interviews were conducted with 32 participants employed by public defender organizations in a large Northeastern city: 14 attorneys, 11 social workers and 7 parent advocates.Thematic analysis was used to identify three distinct themes: (1) Keeping the Lines of Communication Open (the importance of regular communication between parents and attorneys); (2) Strategic Use of Parent Voice (the intentionality behind when and how parents should speak directly to the judge); and (3) Parents as Chameleons (the grooming of parents to meet certain judicial ideals of parenthood).Theme‐specific strategies are offered to support legal professionals in the empowerment of their clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Riggs v. Palmer has become famous since Dworkin used it to show that legal positivism is defective. The debate over the merits of Dworkin's claims is still very lively. Yet not enough attention has been paid to the fact that the content of the statute at issue in Riggs was given by the counterfactual intention of the legislature. According to arguments from legislative intent, a judicial decision is justified if it is based on the lawmaker's intention. But can legislative intentions be determined counterfactually? More generally, what are the discursive commitments undertaken by a lawyer or a judge, in an exchange of legal reasons, when using this interpretive methodology? This paper addresses these issues considering, in particular, David Lewis's "resemblance" condition and "relevant similarity" between possible worlds in the evaluation of counterfactual statements. The analysis sheds some new light on the debate on theoretical disagreements and shows that Dworkin's conception of law as an argumentative practice is not necessarily at odds with legal positivism. It rather allows us to look at it under a better light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thorrun Govind is a community pharmacist, lawyer and former Chair of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) English Pharmacy Board with extensive media experience in radio, television and social media. Here, she talks to Joy Ogden about how she is spreading the word about the value of pharmacists in the community as well as their further potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children placed in residential care are significantly over‐represented in youth justice systems. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with service providers, this exploratory study examines practice factors that impact on the criminalization of this group of children across multiple services and systems, including in the residential care environment, police, lawyers, courts and youth justice systems, as well as multi‐systems practice with this group in one Australian state. Positive outcomes were observed for children in residential care where well‐functioning care teams existed, as well as for children in therapeutic residential care settings. However, clear limitations were identified across all phases of children's youth justice system involvement, including placement with offending peers, the criminalization of behaviours of concern, greater use of remand and detention, limited support to navigate legal and youth justice processes, challenges to service collaboration, and limited applicability of sentencing considerations. The findings indicate a pervasive level of systemic disadvantage for this group of children, and imply that a holistic strategy underpinned by affirmative action across several systems will be necessary to address the ongoing criminalization of children in residential care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We rely upon a 50‐state, 20‐year panel to find that the number of Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) takers is only loosely related to economic conditions—although slightly more for men than for women, who in 2020 accounted for 58% of all LSAT takers. The number of test takers rose more than 35% between 2014 and 2020. This wave accentuated an already existing downtrend in the median real income of lawyers, and thus provides support for the hypothesis that most states have more lawyers than they need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For years, Canadian refugee status determination (RSD) procedures have faced significant administrative capacity issues. Arguing that the RSD system was attracting "unfounded" claims and becoming inefficient, the Harper government pursued rights‐restrictive reforms. Is there a connection between applicants' procedural rights and the efficiency of Canadian RSD? This article outlines and empirically tests arguments for and against restricting refugee applicants' procedural rights to enhance efficiency. Examining macro‐level trends in applications and micro‐level adjudicator‐specific routines, it presents evidence against the notion that rights‐restrictive measures save adjudicators time. The article also shows that procedural rights can foster efficient RSD practices when applicants and adjudicators have access to competent legal counsel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the impact of legal representation in an administrative setting. Focusing on adversarial proceedings within the United States Patent and Trademark Office and employing new data on patent litigation, we investigate patent rights—a legal area dominated by specialized, upper‐hemisphere litigation teams that generally represent parties with ample resources. Even in an environment with substantial parity in representational capability, we find that litigation team quality matters. Perceived firm quality and litigation team size both enhance the likelihood of victory; these findings are robust under a number of different approaches used to account for the ability of attorneys to select their clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the world of health care litigation it has become clear that medical malpractice cases now contain two claims—one on the medicine and one on the electronic health record (EHR). Two years of contentious discovery motions over the production of a complete copy of the EHR and audit trail in a case involving the delivery of a baby recently resulted in a nightmare scenario for a large health care system: sanctions in the form of an order entering judgment of liability in favor of the patient. The order was entered before depositions on the medicine were ever held. The decision in Prieto v. Rush University Medical Center (RUMC), et al. is the premiere example why patients' lawyers are focused on the audit trail. In this case, they were able to secure a legal victory without even litigating the underlying facts of the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to a popular belief of lawyers having the most strict perception of law, law professionals actually strongly skew toward more favorable views of digital sharing. According to our qualitative study, relying on in‐depth interviews with 50 Harvard lawyers, digital piracy is quite acceptable. It is considered fair, especially among friends and for noncommercial purposes. We argue that this not only can indicate that the existing law is becoming outdated because of its inability to be enforced, but also that ethically it is not corresponding to what is considered fair, good service, or being societally beneficial. The common perception of relying on a fixed price for digital content is eroding. We show that on the verges of business, society, and law, there is a potential for the new paradigm of digital commons to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]