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.

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.

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.

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.