1 A. A. Berle, Jr., Legal Profession and Legal Education: Modern Legal Profession, in 9 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences 341 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1933).Google Scholar

2 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite 289 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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4 Jerold S. Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

5 For some interesting figures in this regard, see Doug Lavine, Corporate Legal Units Moving Up, 1 Nat'l L.J. 1 (1978).Google Scholar

6 See Richard A. Watson & Rondal G. Downing, The Politics of the Bench and the Bar: Judicial Selection Under the Missouri Nonpartisan Court Plan (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1969), and John P. Heinz, Edward O. Laumann, Charles L. Cappell, Terence C. Halliday, & Michael H. Schaalman, Diversity, Representation, and Leadership in an Urban Bar: A First Report on a Survey of the Chicago Bar, 1976 A.B.F. Res. J. 717.Google Scholar

7 See Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973), and Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Law in Modern Society (New York: Free Press, 1976) for two very good expositions of this position.Google Scholar

8 “Corporate actor” as used here and throughout this paper is a term of art becoming very common in sociology. While “corporation” could stand as an equivalent term, “corporate actor” is used to indicate that the actors with which we will be dealing here need not be business or economic entities. For a more lengthy statement of the meaning of corporate actor, see James S. Coleman, Power and the Structure of Society 14–16 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974).Google Scholar

9 Suzanne Keller, Beyond the Ruling Class: Strategic in Modern Society 4 (New York: Random House, 1963).Google Scholar

10 Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940).Google Scholar

11 For one more interested in the knowledge elite of the legal community, it is possible to draw the distinction even more finely, for the teachers and the researchers are not completely identical groups. For the purposes of this study, however, that refinement is not very critical.Google Scholar

12 Heinz et al., supra note 6, at 727.Google Scholar

13 DR2–105 of the Illinois code of professional responsibility lists three exceptions to this general rule: patents, trademarks, and admiralty law. Code of Professional Responsibility–Annotated (IIlinois), Canon 2, at 2–130 (Chicago: Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education, 1978).Google Scholar

14 Laumann, Edward O. & Heinz, John P., Specialization and Prestige in the Legal Profession: The Structure of Deference, A.B.F. Res. J. 19 77 155.Google Scholar

15 Id.Google Scholar

16 We should note that the interview respondents in this study were all men. Nevertheless, there is no a priori reason to believe that our generalizations about lawyers will not apply to women as well.Google Scholar

17 In the popular press, the best example is undoubtedly Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1971). For more scholarly literature, see Harold F. Gosnell, Machine Politics: Chicago Model (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937); Martin Meyerson & Edward C. Banfield, Politics, Planning and the Public Interest: The Case of Public Housing in Chicago (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1955); Edward C. Banfield, Political Influence (New York: Free Press, 1961); James Q. Wilson, The Amateur Democrat: Club Politics in Three Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); and Milton Leon Rakove, Don't Make No Waves-Don't Back No Losers: An Insider's Analysis of the Daley Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

18 Talcott Parsons, Suggestions for a Sociological Approach to the Theory of Organizations (pts. 1 & 2), 1 Admin. Sci. Q. 63, 225 (1956–57), and James D. Thompson, Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw Hill Book Co., 1967).Google Scholar

19 Parsons's AGM paradigm is a schema he developed to clarify and guide the task of analyzing any given social system. Each letter represents one of the four functions that Parsons claims every social system needs to perform in order to insure its continued survival: A for adaptation, G for goal attainment, I for integration, and L for latent pattern maintenance and tension management. Parsons has used this schema as a starting point for his many contributions to the development of sociological theory, but in this paper I have adopted it simply as a logical classification scheme to order the process of devising a list of corporate actors. For a brief review of Parsons's theory, see Talcott Parsons, General Theory in Sociology, in Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, & Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr., eds., Sociology Today: Problems and Prospects (New York: Basic Books, 1959). For a thorough exposition of the theory, see Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951). A review of the four primary functions of systems of action is in Parsons's The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), and a review of the corresponding types of organizations is in his Suggestions for a Sociological Approach, supra note 18, at 228–29.Google Scholar

20 Keller, supra note 9, at 4.Google Scholar

21 According to the figures compiled by Fortune for its 1978 list of top American corporations.Google Scholar

22 Citations to the sources of this and the following quotations are omitted here to respect our interview respondents' confidentiality, which might otherwise be compromised.Google Scholar

23 That list of 30 specialties can be found in Laumann & Heinz, supra note 14, at 166–67.Google Scholar

24 Erwin O. Smigel, The Wall Street Lawyer: Professional Organization Man? (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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27 Supra note 24.Google Scholar

28 Id. at 159.Google Scholar

29 Id. (footnote omitted). Smigel's description is reinforced by that provided in David T. Bazelon, Portrait of a Business Generalist, 24 Commentary 277 (1960). ^aNo other specialty field was chosen by more than three members of the elite. Thus, the other 27 specialty fields and the number of respondents who chose them are not shown here.Google Scholar

30 Eulau & Sprague, supra note 25.Google Scholar

31 Schudson, Michael, Public, Private, and Professional Lives: The Correspondence of David Dudley Field and Samuel Bowles, Am. J. Legal Hist. 21 191 (1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 See Thompson, supra note 18, at 10.Google Scholar

33 Donnell, supra note 26.Google Scholar

34 For a complete discussion of those who judge characteristics of the specialties, the variables, and their methods of scoring, see Laumann & Heinz, supra note 14, at 164–68.Google Scholar

35 Table 4 actually summarizes the results of nine cross-tabulations of our survey respondents. To construct those nine tables, I divided the sets of specialty scores generated by Laumann and Heinz into two categories, high and low. Then our elite survey respondents were distributed across a fourfold table in accordance with both their self-identified roles in relation to their respective corporate actors (the narrower lawyer-client role or the wider general activist role) and the ranking of their primary legal specialty on each of the nine characteristics. All the tables were structured as follows: Yule's Q is a measure of association between two variables which can be calculated for cross-tables like these. It is interpreted like a correlation coefficient. Thus the closer a value of Q approaches ±, the stronger the association is; the closer it approaches 0, the weaker. Positive values show that narrow roles are associated with low scores on specialty characteristics and wide roles with high scores; negative values show that wide roles are associated with low scores on specialty characteristics and narrower roles with high scores.Google Scholar

36 One commits the “ecological fallacy” when one imputes the characteristics of collectivities to each of their individual members without actually examining those members on an individual basis. For a detailed discussion of this problem, and examples of it from empirical data, see W. S. Robinson, Ecological Correlations and the Behavior of Individuals, 15 Am. SOC. Rev. 351 (1950).Google Scholar

37 I use the word “classical” in this context because founding fathers of sociology who examined law and the work of lawyers–such scholars as Emile Durkheim or Karl Marx-generally regarded those topics as dependent variables changing pursuant to changes in the lawyer society. After a long hiatus, that classical tradition is being resurrected by a group of contemporary scholars concerned with the role of law in society. The early treatment of the problem is probably best seen in Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964); the recent treatment can be examined in Donald Black, The Behavior of'Law (New York: Academic Press, 1976).Google Scholar

38 Bell, supra note 7, at 42–43, 283, and ch. 4 generally (footnote omitted from quotation).Google Scholar

39 Unger, supra note 7, especially ch. 3.Google Scholar