The following two themes emerge in an investigation of legal culture in the United States: (1) a denigration of rights and yet (2) a persistent notion that rights are important and should be salvaged. The discourse of rights continues to act as an important frame of reference throughout legal culture. The open-ended nature of rights discourse plus the powerful cultural resonance of rights encourage the use of rights talk to frame issues even when the framers are severely critical of the use of rights. Even if many people agree, however, there are reasons to assess this consensus negatively.

Based on extensive archival research, this article offers a political account of the six-year process in which the ABA developed its latest ethics code for lawyers, the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. The article casts doubt on the validity of several functionalist and critical theories about the provenance and significance of professional ethics codes generally and the ABA's codes in particular. It evaluates the Model Rules process as an instance of de facto law making by a private group. And it identifies a lawyer's “professionalism-in-fact”—a set of common themes in the way lawyers currently think about the field of legal ethics. At the same time, however, the article stresses the ethical pluralism and structural differentiation of today's legal profession and roots the ethical preoccupations of various types of lawyers in the circumstances of their particular practices.

The antitrust laws demand competition but, in general, no competitive outcome is possible in markets characterized by substantial fixed costs. Consequently, restrictions on competition may have an efficiency defense, and a prohibition of cartel agreements may entail costs as well as benefits. Giving examples, this essay illustrates the problem that fixed costs pose for competition, long recognized in economics, and discusses implications for real-world industries. The author addresses Wiley's recent criticism of theoretical and empirical work on the fixed cost problem and outlines an agenda for legal research that can help illuminate the underlying economic and antitrust policy issues posed by industries with high fixed costs.