The Practice of Law in Public Interest Law Organizations



The Practice of Law in Public Interest Law Organizations

PIs: Catherine Albiston (Berkeley Law), Laura Beth Nielsen (Northwestern)

Funders: American Bar Foundation

This is a multiyear empirical study of public interest law organizations and the legal profession. It is the first comprehensive study of public interest law since the rapid growth of this field in the 1960s and 1970s. The project developed and surveyed a national random sample of more than 200 organizations across the ideological spectrum and across many different practice areas. Our research seeks to explain variation in strategy, structure and mission across these organizations, including differences across ideological boundaries, practice areas, and over time. We ask how funding sources and other environmental factors affect these organizations’ strategies and agendas, as well as how organizational structure relates to media presence and coverage of these organizations. We also designed the survey to replicate questions from earlier studies of public interest organizations to investigate change over time. Our first publication compares our data to prior surveys to show how public interest law, like law practice more generally, has moved toward more bureaucratic forms of practice over time. The second examines how recent doctrinal developments restricting fee recovery have affected access to representation and parties’ litigation behavior. Manuscripts in progress examine variation in budgets, funding, location, activities and other factors among these firms, as well as the effects of legislative restrictions on firm activities and the role that institutional fund raisers play in program development.

Products of this Project to Date:

Laura Beth Nielsen & Catherine Albiston, The Organization of Public Interest Practice: 1975-2004, 84 North Carolina Law Review 1591 (2006).

Catherine Albiston & Laura Beth Nielsen, The Procedural Attack on Civil Rights: The Empirical Reality of Buckhannon for the Private Attorney General, 54 UCLA Law Review 1087 (2007).

Catherine Albiston & Laura Beth Nielsen, Funding the Cause: How Public Interest Organizations Fund Their Activities (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of Law and Society Association, manuscript in progress).

Catherine Albiston & Laura Beth Nielsen, Mapping Law and Social Reform in the 21st Century: Public Interest Law Organizations in the United States (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of Law and Society Association, manuscript in progress).

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