Doctoral Dissertation Research: Screening, Sorting, and Selecting in Products Liability Cases: How Lawyers Mediate Access to the Civil Justice System

产品责任律师如何筛选案件和客户？ 长期以来，社会法律学者一直对律师调解公民诉诸民事司法系统的方式感兴趣。 在以前的工作中，社会法学学者集中在成本和收益的影响，客户和他们的律师之间的地位差异，以及公司和国家一级的法律的文化对这些决定。 本项目评估了产品责任案件中诉讼现象的四种理论方法。 这项比较研究基于对美国四个州的80名产品责任律师的深入定性访谈和人种学实地观察，代表了两种类型的州级法律的文化。 PI将与四个州的20名产品责任律师进行访谈，以了解律师对筛选过程、陪审团、侵权改革和法律的文化的理由、做法、决策过程、态度和信念。 此外，将观察律师与客户的互动，以了解筛选是一个互动，协商和动态的过程。拟议的项目是第一次系统地调查文化对筛选过程的影响。 这也将是第一个研究采用多方法定性，比较分析的研究法律的专业人士，它是值得注意的，在其重点产品责任律师，专业的人身伤害律师，以前没有明确的重点，重大的实证研究。

How do products liability lawyers screen cases and clients? Socio-legal scholars have long been interested in the ways in which lawyers mediate citizens' access to the civil justice system. In previous work, sociolegal scholars have focused on the influence of costs and benefits, status differences between clients and their attorneys, and firm- and state-level legal cultures on such decisions. This project assesses four theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of litigation in products liability cases. This comparative study, based on in-depth qualitative interviews and ethnographic field observations of 80 products liability lawyers in four U.S. states, representing two types of state-level legal cultures. The PI will conduct interviews with 20 products liability lawyers in each of four states to capture lawyers' reasons, practices, decision-making processes, attitudes, and beliefs about the screening process, juries, tort reforms, and legal cultures. In addition, lawyers' interactions with clients will be observed in order to understand screening as a process that is interactional, negotiated, and dynamic. The proposed project is the first systematic investigation of cultural influences on the screening process. It will also be the first study to employ a multi-method qualitative, comparative analysis to the study of legal professionals, and it is notable in its focus on products liability lawyers, a specialty of personal injury lawyers that has not previously been the explicit focus of significant empirical research.