Debate continues over the Supreme Court's decision in City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power v. Manhart. As most readers of this article already know, Manhart held illegal an annuity plan in which both sexes would receive equal periodic benefits after retirement although women made larger contributions while working. In collaboration with two colleagues, we defended the decision in another journal.* Although we tried to answer all of Manhart's critics, much of our attention was devoted to our colleague Spencer Kimball, who had published the most thorough and powerful of the attacks on Manhart. He has now published a reply.4 In the interests of having the main arguments on both sides summarized in the same journal, and of correcting misimpressions about the nature and extent of our argument, we offer this comment.

The American Bar Association is considering a revision of its Code of Professional Responsibility. One revision deals specifically with lawyers whose clients are organizations; it attempts to delineate the ethical responsibilities of such lawyers when they discover an employee or a member of one of their clients is engaged in wrongdoing on the organization's behalf. Because the proposal suggests that corporate counsel may be justified in public disclosure of the wrongdoing when the organization itself fails to rectify the problem, it has sparked much controversy in the profession and much speculation as to whether and when corporate counsel will “blow the whistle.” The article offers a sociological perspective on the act of a corporate counsel's public disclosure of organizational wrongdoing. The act of disclosure is treated as a social behavior, the likelihood of which is increased or decreased by a number of factors including the attorney's awareness of the wrongdoing, the attorney's orientations to the larger profession, the structure of the professional practice setting within which the counsel is located, and the supports for disclosure offered by the legal profession through its formal organizations. These factors are described and then combined into a general predictive model of disclosure by corporate counsel. A concluding discussion of the general ramifications of the proposed revisions focuses on the social implications of the attorney-client privilege, in which the client is as unique an actor as is the large organization.

The authors describe the design and installation of a computerized administration system in a law school clinic. The automated system gathers, maintains, and reports data about the cases and the activities of clinical teachers and students. It is found that automated case and time data systems can improve the quality of client service and education and simultaneously support empirical research. The authors propose that a national coding protocol for computer management systems be established to facilitate uniform data gathering about clinical education.

This article summarizes the results of a study of 291 reported cases brought against media for libel during a four-year period. The results confirmed the finding in an earlier study that only 5 percent of plaintiffs emerged from the appellate process with judgments compared with more than 60 percent of defendants. Most of the defense successes occurred without trial. In cases that did reach trial, plaintiffs were successful far more often before juries than before judges but lost more than half these judgments on appeal. Cases were analyzed in terms of the identity of the parties, the content of the charges, and the role of state and federal law in shaping the outcome. Despite the recent attention to federal constitutional protections, it is clear that media defendants still do, and must, rely heavily on state law defenses. Finally, the Hutchinson and Wolston rulings of 1979 produced little change in appellate decisions.