Professional Marginity Summary

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In Mechanisms and Consequences of Professional Marginality: The Case of Poverty Lawyers Revisited. Law & Social Inquiry, Marina Zaloznaya and Laura Beth Nielsen explore the consequences of the professional marginality of legal aid practice. The authors’ case study is based on thirty-five in-depth interviews of practicing poverty lawyers and legal interns in Chicago. They detail the types, mechanisms and consequences of legal aid. After interviews were completed, they coded their data to determine the aspects of legal practice that caused lawyers anxiety and changed their understandings of professionalism. The authors’ study is designed according to Jack Katz’s Poor People’s Lawyers in Transition, which is an ethnographic analysis of the evolution of the Chicago legal aid professional world in the 1960s and 1970s. In order to build their study on the strain and contradiction of working in legal aid, the authors use the concept of marginalization to complement Katz’s notion of routinization. Their concept of marginalization is both material and symbolic. Legal aid lawyers work in ill-equipped offices with …show more content…

Firstly, attorneys’ ideological commitment declines as they become skeptical about the possibility of social change. They are unable to engage with individual cases and their victories do not successfully challenge the status quo. As such, they deal with ideological marginality. They also experience task marginality because the lack of administrative assistance makes their work is difficult to complete. Thirdly, they experience material marginality because they are compensated less than other lawyers. Finally, they experience status marginality because their non-legal-aid colleagues marginalize them as if they were less qualified. Clients themselves are disrespectful towards

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