The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 was a far-reaching effort to reduce the pervasive dangers of the work environment. It was also in several respects a novel experiment in regulation. The accumulation of five years' experience under the statute affords an opportunity for reexamination of its provisions in the light of numerous judicial decisions.

This research originated from a request that the American Bar Foundation provide information to the Chicago Bar Association's Committee on the Development of the Law in its study of the Association's “role and purpose.” The resulting research by the Foundation is much broader than that originally contemplated in our early conversations with the Committee, and it now constitutes a major study of the Chicago legal profession and its relation to the organizations that represent it A significant part of the study, however, has been addressed to the CBA's concerns, and this article was originally prepared as a report to the Committee. It is being published because we believe that its findings and analyses will be of wider interest. The form of the article remains that of the report to the Committee, though it has been revised for publication.

There is growing interest within the investment community in what are known as “index” or “market” funds. These are mutual or other investment funds that have abandoned the traditional attempt to “beat the market” by picking and choosing among securities-buying stocks or bonds that they believe to be undervalued and selling those they believe to be overvalued. Instead, they create and hold essentially unchanged a portfolio of securities that is designed to approximate some index of market performance such as the Standard & Poor's 500. The S&P 500 is a hypothetical portfolio consisting of 500 major nonfinancial companies on the New York Stock Exchange weighted by the market value of each company's total outstanding shares. Batterymarch Financial Management Corporation in its Market Portfolio holds a 250-stock selection from the S&P 500 designed to track the performance of the S&P 500 very closely. Two major banks, American National Bank and Trust Company of Chicago and Wells Fargo Bank, have created market funds in their trust departments. And several large pension funds, including those of several Bell Telephone Companies and of Exxon, have recently placed a portion of their assets in such funds.

With the enactment of the Clean Air Act amendments in 1970, the federal government, essentially an interested bystander as recently as 1960, became the dominant presence in air pollution control. The current statute provides for federal research, financial support of state control programs, and interstate compacts (secs. 101-106). It retains, in vestigial form, a cumbersome conference procedure (sec. 115) copied from the earlier water-pollution statute and never much used in air pollution. irect federal regulatory authority was substantially increased by the 1970 amendments: the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may now adopt emission standards not only for new vehicles (sec. 202) but also for all aircraft (sec. 231), for new stationary sources of any type that “may contribute significantly to air pollution” (sec. 111), and for any source of a “hazardous” air pollutant, that is, one that “may cause, or contribute to, an increase in mortality or … in serious irreversible, or incapacitating reversible, illness” (sec. 1 12); it may also regulate the contents of motor-vehicle fuels (sec. 211). An emergency provision authorizes the federal agency, absent adequate state or local action, to sue to enjoin any emissions contributing to “an imminent and substantial endangerment to the health of persons” (sec. 303). Yet everyday control of most existing stationary sources remains subject to an awkward joint federal-state system of air-quality standards. That system is the subject of the present article.

Serious questions have been raised of late both within and outside the legal profession about the adequacy of the bar's organization for the delivery of legal services. It is thought that business enterprises and affluent individuals get the service they need-although perhaps at excessive cost and with less than optimal efficiency-but that most of the population are underserved and have serious difficulty in finding legal assistance at all or at an affordable cost.

To own one's own home has long been at the heart of the American dream. Despite the considerable recent attention to new and nontraditional modes of living–in planned communities, town houses, communes, condominiums, and cooperatives–and although some social reformers and intellectuals have criticized conventional modes of living, owning a home and “cooking hamburgers over a charcoal fire” remain a dominant part of the middle class ethos.

Employee pension and welfare plans first appeared in the United States well before the turn of the century, but rapid growth began only in the 1940s, when wartime wage controls, coupled with favorable tax rules, encouraged fringe benefits as a substitute for wage increases. The plans have attained awe-inspiring dimensions since World War II: The Department of Labor estimates 750,000 pension plans and 1,050,000 welfare plans, covering about 35 million persons, with total assets of the pension plans alone growing from $2.4 billion in 1940 to more than $150 billion in 1973. In 1971 the 50,000 largest welfare plans, those with 100 or more participants, paid benefits in excess of $15 billion. But legal service plans, among the most recent of welfare plans and the subject of this study, are still experimental and small; they involve no great amount of resources.

This paper is the first in a series on data collected for the Law Student Activity Patterns Project. The project is one of several discrete studies in the research program in legal education of the American Bar Foundation, conducted at the request of the American Bar Association House of Delegates, with the advice and consultation of the Special Committee for the Study of Legal Education. A major purpose of this research is to develop an understanding of the professionalization of law students in behavioral terms, that is, in terms of patterned activities and time use. However, we will first present a series of initial reports analyzing data relevant to other general concerns about contemporary legal education.

Recent efforts to implement prepaid legal services plans have raised antitrust questions, and the objective of this article is a systematic analysis of those questions and the problems to which they lead. After an introduction to prepaid legal services plans that sets the factual background, a number of specific antitrust problems will be examined: jurisdictional issues, the exemption for state action, minimum price fixing, joint ventures, maximum price fixing, discrimination against certain types of plans, and exclusive dealing problems. Finally, prepaid legal services plans will be examined in light of the McCarran-Ferguson Act exemption of the “business of insurance” from antitrust coverage which, in turn, will necessitate a look at existing and potential state regulatory control over prepaid legal services plans.

Medical malpractice, a subject that once languished in comparative obscurity, has in recent years become one of the most hotly debated topics of our time. The reasons for its surge to prominence, not only in medical and legal circles but also in the public eye, are not difficult to detect. Vast increases, slow at first but more rapid of late, have been evident in the number of medical malpractice actions; in the number of actions in which the plaintiffs have recovered; in the average size of their recovery; and, as a consequence, in the cost of medical malpractice insurance. In and of itself the unmistakable trend in the figures need not be a source of public concern. We could simply wash our hands of the whole affair and indulge in the happy assumption that the matter eventually will sort itself out in the marketplace. The cost of malpractice awards could be treated as just another cost of providing medical care that will, in the long run at least, be passed on to either taxpayer or consumer.

The sharp increase that occurred in 1975 in premiums charged doctors and hospitals for medical malpractice insurance raises a number of issues of concern to economists. This paper attempts to survey some of the more important. At first glance the various sections may appear unrelated to each other and without a unifying theme. However, this disunity is superficial. Sections III-V, the bulk of the paper, are repeated applications of a central proposition of economic theory: purposive behavior is to be explained as the rational pursuit of a set of competing objectives by individuals who are constrained by limited resources and must therefore allocate these resources among alternative uses. This proposition is used in section 111 to explain differences in malpractice claim payments among states and changes over time; in section IV, to analyze the effect of different legal arrangements for distributing the cost of iatrogenic injuries on the behavior of patients and doctors; in section V, to show the effect of different methods of compensating lawyers upon their fees and the volume of litigation they undertake; and in section VI, to consider the unresolved question of “who bears the cost of malpractice claim settlements?” As will be seen, the nature of the argument reflects an economist's outlook; its viewpoint is different from that of doctors, lawyers, or “concerned citizens.”

This article has been produced under the Samuel Pool Weaver Constitutional Law Essay program, which is supported by trust funds given to the American Bar Foundation by the late Samuel Pool Weaver to encourage research and writing about the Constitution and its application to current problems. Under the terms of the program as presently structured, a constitutional law scholar is invited from time to time to write an essay on a subject agreed upon between the scholar and the American Bar Foundation. This is the first essay produced under the program's new format.

This is a study of the voir dire proceedings in the trial of the United States v. John Mitchell and Maurice Stans in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in the spring of 1974 (docket no. 73 Cr. 439). The major charge was conspiracy to impede a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Robert L. Vesco, a financier, a fugitive at the time of the trial, in return for a $200,000 cash contribution to President Nixon's reelection campaign.

Although the Truth in Lending Act (TIL) was actively considered by Congress for the better part of a decade questions of coverage rarely arose, and debate on the scope of the coverage provisions was almost nonexistent. The reasons appear to be twofold. First, as Justice Frankfurter observed, every statute has a “core of indisputable application” about which there is little question, and there was general agreement that certain types of transactions constituting the majority of consumer credit transactions would clearly be covered. Thus the undisputed coverage of the TIL Act was very broad. Second, legislators were preoccupied with debating a number of the substantive provisions that creditors found so objectionable and consumerists thought so necessary that little attention was focused on defining the perimeter of coverage. Moreover, as this paper will show, a number of “fringe” transactions bear at least superficial resemblance to transactions that were clearly to be covered. Thus, creditors might wisely have preferred to take their chances on later interpretations of the scope of coverage by administrators and courts rather than risking a specific congressional resolution. of the coverage issues.

Private treble damage actions have long been recognized to play a major role in antitrust enforcement. The present study evaluates the impact of the class action on private antitrust enforcement in one large commercial district, the Northern District of Illinois. Data were collected through attorney interviews and from the docket books and files of the clerk of the court on all antitrust treble damage actions not transferred to some other district that were filed from the inception of the amendment to rule 23 on July 1, 1966, through June 30, 1973.

The legal profession is currently the subject of controversy and criticism. Individual attorneys are often described as unethical and incompetent, while the bar is portrayed as politically partisan, captive of economic interests, and unresponsive to the public interest. Public opinion polls document disrespect for attorneys as a group. Local and national scandals highlight criminal acts of prominent attorneys. The cost, quality, and availability of legal services are matters of public debate.

The common question class action has been a source of division and controversy in the legal community. Hailed by its proponents as both a means for small claimants to obtain redress and a deterrent to corporate wrongdoing, the class action has been attacked by others as tantamount to “legalized blackmail” and as threatening to swamp the already overburdened judicial system with proceedings of extraordinary complexity. Two empirical studies of the class action have also reached diametrically opposed conclusions. A study by the American College of Trial Lawyers found that the common question class action suit “has mandated heavy expenditures of judicial time, effort and expense” and has sacrificed “procedural and substantive fairness to the party opposing the class,” while a study commissioned by the Senate Commerce Committee found that most class actions “proceed with reasonable smoothness in the Federal court.” Proposals to restrict the use of class actions have been advanced. While these proposals have not been adopted, the courts have increasingly limited the circumstances under which class actions may be maintained.

This bibliography of the American Bar Foundation's published research was compiled within definite limitations. The principal consideration was the provision of a historical record of the research product of the American Bar Foundation from its beginning.

Computerized document retrieval systems are now a commercial reality; they enable attorneys and other researchers to search quickly through large collections of judicial decisions and statutes for those containing words pertinent to their inquiries. While these systems can free the researcher from the constraints of formal indexing, they leave him enslaved to a different master-word usage in the documents through which he is searching With these new systems, the retrievability of a document is determined by its word content, and that in turn is determined by the vocabulary and stylistic habits of the document's author. Thus, judges and other document authors unwittingly serve as the indexers of these systems.