Indeed; I believe casual dress in general-purpose, public adult leisure contexts was initially associated strongly with the upper/upper-middle classes and was seen as a signal of higher status, even in cases where the dress item in question was an appropriation from the working class (e.g., jeans).
I flew from JFK to Heathrow in 1986 (don't recall the airline but assume it was either a major US carrier or British Airways) - I vividly remember the cabin being full of cigarette smoke. I suppose there must have been a nominal "section" but can't remember.
According to Wikipedia:
"After years of debate over health concerns, Congressional action in 1987 led to a ban on inflight smoking.
The U.S. ban on inflight smoking began with domestic flights of two hours or less in April 1988, extended to domestic flights of six hours or less in February 1990, and to all domestic and international flights in 2000."
Actually, plagiarism and copyright infringement are different things. For example, it is possible to plagiarize something that is not copyrighted, and many forms of copyright infringement wouldn't fit the definition of plagiarism.
Right. And there's been a trend at least over the past 10-15 years at larger companies of more work being done in-house -- the baseline, routine stuff you speak of -- rather than being outsourced to firms, another factor in the increasing pressure on the traditional big firm legal services model.
That's essentially right. Law schools have generally not focused on providing any sort of training for the actual practice of law. The model of education established by the elite law schools and imitated to a large extent by most of the non-elite ones is focused on teaching how to "think like a lawyer", which is probably better seen as how to think like an appellate judge. The elite law schools for the most part offer little in the way of practical training. Some schools have electives, taught generally by adjuncts or lower-status "clinical" professors, that are aimed more at practical skills, though these tend to focus on aspects of litigation or administrative practice rather than various sorts of other areas of legal practice.
I don't think things are too different as you get to the less elite law schools, though some of them may attempt to prepare students to pass the local state bar exam. One reason for this is that even at the lower tier faculty tend to be drawn from the top graduates of the top schools, who excelled in the traditional program of elite legal education and thus are disinclined to see anything questionable about it (I suspect).
A lot of what's been going on at the higher end of the legal services industry is greater cost control by clients. Expensive, elite law firms had a long run in which they were able to justify heavy pyramid-like staffing of matters based on a pure billable hour model. Those days are basically over (though major litigation work has probably changed the least in this respect). That change has had some effects on the amount of hiring done by the elite firms and also has had some effect on salary structure. Pressure at the more elite end of the profession has ripple effects downward to the less elite end.
One paragraph in the article gets at what's been happening: "With big-firm jobs drying up, however, many of these graduates began competing for lower-paying spots at midsize firms, which also downsized, and certain government jobs they wouldn’t have sought in an earlier era."
I don't quite think of it as the American economy actually needing fewer lawyers than it used to. Rather, for a period of maybe a couple of decades (I think beginning with the 1980s business boom, so roughly 1985-2005) the biggest law firms enjoyed unusual success with the business model I refer to above. I think we're seeing a kind of correction where the legal profession is starting to look more like it was before the 1980s.
In some ways I think there may be more interesting opportunities for lawyers now. I see a lot of lawyers with a few years' experience establishing solo or boutique-firm practices in specialized areas that I don't think would have been as viable a couple of decades ago. Someone commented that you should only go to law school if you go to 'Harvard or Yale', but I am not sure that is what I'd take from recent developments. However, if your goal is to get a job in a big elite firm after graduating from law school, opportunities for those who didn't go to one of the top national schools (not limited to Harvard and Yale of course) are no doubt more reduced than 10 or 20 years ago.
Patents have been granted on claims that essentially cover an API. I think it would be harder to get such patents issued today than 10 years ago though.
(with the last line being the most common variant I remember, although I think it was common to strategically append things like 'and you are not it')