Attorney Advertising in the Wake of Bates V. State Bar of Arizona (1977)

Abstract

In this study the author seeks to understand responses to judicial policies where the consumer population (i.e., those most directly affected by the change in the policy status quo) have a variety of options available to them, including the option of doing nothing. On the basis of the "voluntary consumption" situation of lawyer advertising that was permitted by the Supreme Court decision in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona (1977), members of the consumer population are surveyed to determine their responses to the change in judicial policy. Competing utility and attitudinal and environmental theories are tested by estimating a logit model designed to predict advertising behavior by lawyers in the wake of the Bates decision. When theoretically distinct models are tested against one another, the attitudinal framework is most successful in predicting which potential consumers would become actual consumers. More research is necessary, however, to determine the ways in which these competing theoretical perspectives interact in shaping the decisions of potential consumers to become actual consumers.