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，社会法学学者主要关注成本和收益、委托人和他们的律师之间的地位差异以及公司和州一级的法律文化对此类决定的影响。本项目对产品责任案件中诉讼现象的四种理论方法进行了评估。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，这些律师代表了两种州级法律文化。PI将对四个州的20名产品责任律师进行访谈，以了解律师们关于筛选过程、陪审团、侵权改革和法律文化的原因、做法、决策过程、态度和信念。此外，还将观察律师与客户的互动，以便理解筛选是一个互动、协商和动态的过程。这项拟议的项目是对筛选过程中文化影响的第一次系统调查。这也将是第一次采用多方法定性、比较分析来研究法律专业人员的研究，值得注意的是，它的重点是产品责任律师，这是一种人身伤害律师的专业，以前并不是重大实证研究的明确重点。

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.