Sex Discrimination and Law Firm Culture on the Internet

Despite the availability of some formal legal remedies, women lawyers rarely challenge discriminatory behaviour. This book explores this seemingly contradictory situation, and by exploring lawyers' use of legal discourse in an Internet community, Baumle examines whether the law can in fact serve as a useful tool to challenge inequality.

"In an innovative study, Baumle brings the investigation of legal mobilization into the digital age. Her examination of posts dealing with sex discrimination and sexual harassment in an online community for law firm associates challenges some of the assumptions of the legal mobilization literature...Highly recommended." - J. Aliotta, CHOICE

This book forges new methodological territory in how to study the internet and substantially contributes to our understanding of the processes by which individuals come to think they have a right, understand that someone has breached it, and go about making the decision about whether to ask for redress. This kind of research is at the cutting edge of sociology of law, law and society, and anthropology." - Laura Beth Nielsen, Research Professor, American Bar Foundation; Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Legal Studies, Northwestern University

"Baumle's ethnography of an online community for lawyers both deepens the existing scholarship regarding online interactions, as well as offers a fresh take on analyses of the legal profession. She deconstructs the prevalent cultural myth of the litigious nature of the lawyer, exploring the dispute process from an insider's perspective. The exploration of the profession wherein lies the expertise to deal with sex discrimination and sexual harassment that the rest of us are supposed to rely upon, and the exposure that these professionals are as dismayed by navigating the process of defining and redressing such harms, is a welcome contribution to the literatures of gender studies, qualitative methodology, internet studies, and legal studies." - Sarah N. Gatson, Associate Professor, Sociology, Texas A&M University

AMANDA K. BAUMLE is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Houston, USA. She specializes in sociology of law, demography, and social inequality. She has authored, coauthored, or edited several books and articles, including Same-Sex Partners: The Demography of Sexual Orientation and Demography in Transition: Emerging Trends in Population Studies.