Expanding on the Behavior of Law

My first supposition is to assume there is a correlation between the quantity of law and the quantity of lawyering done. By lawyering, I mean the work of lawyers including research, writing briefs, motions, responses, conducting depositions, etc. Of course, this isn’t a perfect correlation because many events that count as law in Black’s sense are not events performed by lawyers. So while an arrest would probably lead to lawyering, an arrest is work done by a police officer not a lawyer.

If that proposition is true then, then it would follow that in more unequal societies there is more lawyering and consequently more lawyers, more lawyering happens between people of high rank than between people of low rank, and more lawyering occurs downward than upward. All of these propositions strike me as true, but the whole exercise feels incomplete.

I’m left wondering about causality in this model. For instance, what’s the real relationship between law and lawyering? Law generates lawyering, but how much law does lawyering generate? Would the same amount of lawyering done downward generate more law than lawyering upward, or are lawyering and law proportional so that lawyering upward would generate as much law as lawyering downward, but there is simply less lawyering done upward, presumably because of the difference in resources and wealth. Essentially the question is, is law a function of lawyering, or vice-versa? Or are they co-dependent?

Also, what’s the relationship between stratification, law, and lawyering? Black’s model takes the stratification as a given and explains law from it. But Black’s model doesn’t say anything about what happens if we decrease the amount of downward law. So while downward law may be greater than upward law, what if, given the same stratification level, we decrease the strength of downward law, how does that affect the stratification structure of the society? My inclination is to believe that would change the stratification structure itself to be more compressed and less unequal. Or we could also increase the strength of upward law. This decrease/increase in strength would be done, I think, through lawyering.

I think introducing lawyering and explaining the relationship between lawyering and law, and also the absolute level of level of law/lawyering in addition to their relative levels might generate some helpful insights. Some of the ones that came out here, assuming the propositions are true: If you want to change the stratification structure, decrease the strength of downward and increase the strength of upward law. So then, do more upward lawyering and less downward lawyering.

-- EdiRumano - 12 Apr 2012