There is no single, authoritative national statistic on how many U.S. attorneys primarily practice criminal law. Federal data sources classify lawyers by employer or industry rather than by subject-matter specialization, and bar organizations’ tabulations are not standardized across jurisdictions. Consequently, the best evidence comes from large, peer-reviewed studies of the legal profession that measure practice fields within representative samples and from scholarly syntheses of that literature. Taken together, these sources converge on a consistent picture: criminal practice constitutes a small minority of the U.S. bar—on the order of the mid–single digits, rising when prosecutors and public defenders are included.
The most detailed field-distribution evidence comes from the American Bar Foundation’s landmark “Chicago Lawyers” research program, which repeatedly mapped the practice ecology of a large metropolitan bar. In the 1990s wave reported in Urban Lawyers, criminal work accounted for only a small slice of the bar overall, with criminal defense occupying a modest share of private practitioners and a substantial fraction of government lawyers working as prosecutors or public defenders; combined, the criminal sphere in that metropolitan sample fell in the mid–single digits of the total bar (Heinz et al. 2005). An earlier analysis of the same bar in the 1990s similarly found that criminal practice remained a numerically small specialty relative to civil litigation and business-related fields, underscoring the stability of this pattern over time (Heinz, Nelson, and Laumann 1998). These studies also show that criminal practice is disproportionately located in solo and small-firm settings and in the public sector—features that keep its overall share limited even as it is central within those segments of the profession (Heinz et al. 2005).
National syntheses reach parallel conclusions. Reviewing multiple empirical studies, Sandefur characterizes criminal practice as a minority field within the stratified “two hemispheres” of the bar, concentrated in “people law” practices and in government roles rather than in the corporate hemisphere that numerically dominates large-firm employment; in aggregate, this places criminal practice below one-tenth of the profession and typically in the mid–single-digit range (Sandefur 2007). Classic structural accounts of the U.S. profession likewise emphasize that only a small fraction of lawyers specialize primarily in criminal matters, with most legal labor allocated to civil and commercial work; historical estimates in these accounts have consistently located criminal practice as a minor share of the bar (Abel 1989).
Triangulating across these research traditions yields a cautious but defensible estimate for the contemporary United States: approximately 5–8 percent of practicing attorneys primarily practice criminal law. The lower end of that range reflects the small proportion of private practitioners who identify criminal defense as a principal specialty; the upper end reflects inclusion of the sizeable corps of prosecutors and public defenders within government lawyering. Because many civil practitioners occasionally handle criminal matters, the proportion of lawyers who ever do any criminal work is higher than the proportion whose primary practice is criminal. But as a share of the bar defined by primary specialization, the best academic evidence places criminal practice firmly in the single digits (Heinz et al. 2005; Heinz, Nelson, and Laumann 1998; Sandefur 2007; Abel 1989).
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References
Abel, Richard L. 1989. American Lawyers. New York: Oxford University Press.
Heinz, John P., Robert L. Nelson, Rebecca L. Sandefur, and Edward O. Laumann. 1998. “The Changing Character of Lawyers’ Work: Chicago in 1975 and 1995.” Law & Society Review 32 (4): 751–775.
Heinz, John P., Robert L. Nelson, Rebecca L. Sandefur, and Edward O. Laumann. 2005. Urban Lawyers: The New Social Structure of the Bar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sandefur, Rebecca L. 2007. “Staying Power? The Persistence of Social Inequality in the U.S. Legal Profession.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 3: 377–401.
