Legal education is only beginning to make use of the technological capabilities of computers as a medium for instructional design. In this article the authors show the applicability of computer-assisted instruction to law through programmed instructional techniques. They trace the two decades of development of computer-assisted instruction (CAI) in law, the use and misuse of the computer's capabilities, the impact of CAI on law student attitudes and performance, and the positive student endorsement. They carefully analyze the computer's capacity for use in memory drills, tutorial sessions, and simulation exercises. They do not offer an unrestricted endorsement of the computer's capabilities but hope for the continuing development of CAI in the legal education process.

During the 1970s, the “coastal zone”—that ecologically unique area where sea and land meet and strongly influence each other—has become a principal laboratory for experiments in new land management techniques. These coastal experiments are producing institutional arrangements that involve every level of government, and the implementation of the programs may well affect every citizen of the United States.

This exploratory study of the legal problems or needs of prisoners and mental hospital patients (the institutionalized) reveals the wide range and diversity in the perceptions of what the needs are and what the legal responses might be. It argues for the need to conduct research that first promotes our qualitative understanding of legal demand among the institutionalized, and it suggests the need to experiment with and do research on legal supply programs in the institutions. Only then can we begin to think about quantifying the needs and designing with some precision delivery programs based upon such quantitative information. The study also suggests the need for a lawyer role in the institutional context that departs from traditional role perceptions, both in terms of the approach taken to cases and clients and in terms of the substantive problems deemed deserving of legal attention.

The number of lawyers in a society may depend on the level of real income and on the scope of government regulation. Cross-national data and time-series data suggest that the growth in the number of lawyers in the United States during the past 50 years can be better explained by increases in real income than by increases in government regulation. Other tests also suggest that regulation is of lesser importance. The combined share of memberships in American Bar Association Sections more closely allied with government regulation has not increased over time. The share of billings by the legal service industry to firms is found to be relatively stable throughout the post-World War II period, suggesting that the scope of government regulation has not caused business firms to use the legal service industry more intensively over time than individuals have. An examination of the earnings of lawyers over time suggests that members of the legal profession experienced relative prosperity during the 1920s and early 1930s and during the 1960s and early 1970s. The length of these prosperous periods is traced to the slow adjustment in the number of places in law schools.

No branch of zoning law is more perplexing than the constitutional limits of the police power. How severely may the government reduce the value of land by regulation without compensating the owner? This issue has become particularly prominent during the last decade, as state and local governments have sought to preserve the landscape by novel and sometimes stringent land-use controls. Recently, some scholars have suggested that the familiar “diminution-of-value” test for determining when regulations become unconstitutional should be abandoned, even in cases where the prohibited use is not akin to a nuisance, and the effect of the regulation is to render the tract worthless. In Just v. Marinette County, the Wisconsin Supreme Court seemed to adopt this idea, declaring that development of a shoreland marsh may be forbidden irrespective of the economic impact on the landowner. Naturally, such decisions create the impression that property owners are regularly being sacrificed for the sake of environmental quality. But a study of Just's origins and effects reveals that in Wisconsin and Minnesota this impression of regulatory zeal is inaccurate. As a rule, all four of the counties studied allowed owners of shoreland marshes to fill enough of the marsh to make a remunerative use of the tract. Their main concern was not to preserve marshes but rather to attach erosion-control conditions to the fill permits. Cases in which a county, by denying a fill permit, drastically reduced the value of the land, have been extremely rare, even in the three Wisconsin counties studied, where under Just such denials are clearly constitutionally permissible. In these counties, it appears that ideology and politics, not constitutional law, are the major factors limiting the severity of conservancy zoning and consequently the extent to which this technique preserves open space. In jurisdictions where this is so, it seems likely that judicial decisions that permit the government to prohibit all remunerative uses are more likely to rationalize unjust treatment of an occasional landowner than to make a major contribution toward preserving environmental quality.

Historically, the federal government has had a major role in regulation of coastal activities, restricted until recently, however, primarily to regulation of activities affecting navigable water bodies. On the sea coast, regulation of areas landward of such jurisdictional boundaries as “mean high tide line” was generally left to the states or their delegates.

Within recent years our understanding of legal education and the legal profession has been enriched by an increasing number of empirical investigations of legal education. As research interest in this area develops, it is important to assess and to build on past efforts. By serving as a guide to studies on law students, this bibliography is intended to advance that end. We hope that these materials can facilitate access into this field of scholarship and, by so doing, stimulate research on questions that have been raised but not yet answered.

Changes in the law, government regulations, socioeconomic changes, increased consumerism, the public's level of awareness—all these and other factors influence the population's demand over time for lawyers' services. This article analyzes the changes over time in the two elements that determine the demand for lawyers: the number of legal problems encountered by the population and the rate of use of lawyers in solving these problems. After showing that sequential occurrences of legal problems are not independent of each other and are age dependent, the author develops a mathematical model that explains the variability in the present number of problems encountered by different age groups. The number of problems is found to result from a relatively mild accumulation with age of legal problems, coupled with a strong increase in the number of problems from generation to generation. The analysis of individual legal problems reveals a variety of patterns from problem to problem in both the level of occurrence and the rate of use of lawyers for such problems. The author concludes that the combined effect of occurrence and utilization will operate toward a continuing increase in the demand for lawyers'services at least for the very near future.

Much of the discussion of the bar's “public interest” effort has centered on the apparent unwillingness of lawyers, including young lawyers, to pursue public interest rather than traditional careers. To the extent that it is agreed that public interest work should be increased, the problem has been viewed as one of supply of lawyers rather than one of demand for their services. In this paper, just the opposite is argued; a variety of evidence is brought forth to suggest that the current public interest effort is limited mainly by the number of jobs available in that sector. In this light, various methods of increasing the funding of the public interest sector, and hence the number of jobs, are reviewed.

In the past 50 years, eligibility for admission to the bar has come to depend increasingly on the accreditation status of the law school attended. The author traces the history of the American Bar Association's law school accrediting standards and their impact on part-time and proprietary law schools, presents the results of a study of the ABA standard prohibiting the accreditation of proprietary law schools, and discusses ramifications for legal education and the legal profession.

Inaccurate perceptions of the law by ordinary citizens, especially when resolution of conflicts caused by such perceptions is usually handled by lawyers, can lead to cynicism and distrust of government, the legal system, and the lawyers who participate in the system. The authors present some results of research into the functioning of a particular part of the system in a particular place to show how all participants keep the situation from being changed.

The competence of attorneys, and more particularly the competence of trial lawyers, is currently an issue of considerable controversy both within the judiciary and within the legal profession itself. This article addresses the issue of attorneys' courtroom performance as observed by judges. Drawing on data from a survey administered to state and federal judges sitting in trial courts of general jurisdiction, this article explores the relationship of demographic and judicial characteristics to various judicial evaluations of advocacy competence. While it provides important insights into the present state of trial advocacy competence, it also constitutes a systematic examination of the judiciary's perceptions of the trial bar.

Intestate succession statutes should reflect the distributive preferences of intestate decedents. To date, these distributive preferences could only be inferred from distributive patterns found in wills. This telephone survey of 750 persons living in Alabama, California, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Texas supplements prior will studies and provides new insights concerning public attitudes about property distribution at death. The distributive preferences of the respondents revealed few significant differences that could be attributed to age, education, income, wealth, or occupational status. Two other important findings of this study suggest that a modern intestacy statute should provide that (1) the surviving spouse inherit the entire estate in preference to the decedent's issue or family of orientation and (2) issue who are in the same generation share equally in the estate.