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Exploring the Costs of Administrative Legalization: City Expenditures on Legal Services, 1960-1995

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Charles R. Epp
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Abstract

The institutional environment in both the private and public sector, according to a wide range of observers, is increasingly “legalized”: decisionmaking processes and substantive policies are increasingly subject to legal rules and procedural requirements that are enforceable in court. Although there is little dispute that legal liability has expanded in this way, there is great dispute about the effect of these changes, particularly their costs, on public organizations in practice. Some observers argue that legalization has imposed heavy costs, especially financial costs, on organizations; others, for a variety of reasons, argue that these costs are likely to be exaggerated. In this article I suggest that organizational expenditures on legal services are likely to be a valid indicator of certain important elements of the costs of administrative legalization. I present the results of a study of the legal services expenditures of 13 major U.S. cities over a 35-year period. The results indicate that legal services expenditures indeed have increased in many cities, although not as much as some commentators have speculated. Furthermore, there are significant variations in expenditure patterns among the cities, and a number experienced no long-term growth trend in legal services expenditures.

Type
Research on Legal Services
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , 2000 , pp. 407 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

The author wishes to thank the General Research Fund of the University of Kansas for financial support, and Christine Harrington and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

References

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