Lawyers in society: a celebration of the work of Philip Lewis and his legacy

ABSTRACT

This paper begins by explaining Philip Lewis’s key contribution to the development of legal professions studies, culminating in the three volume comparative work Lawyers in Society to which he contributed and co-edited with Rick Abel [(1988a) Lawyers in Society: Vol I The Common Law World (Berkeley, University of California Press); (1988b) Lawyers in Society: Vol II The Civil Law World (Berkeley, University of California Press); (1989a) Lawyers in Society: Vol III Comparative Theories (Berkeley, University of California Press)]. We discuss how this project led to the establishment of the RCSL International Working Group for Comparative Studies of Legal Professions – http://rcsl.iscte.pt/rcsl_wg_professions.htm – and, thirty years later, inspired our current work: Lawyers in 21st Century Societies https://www.bloomsburyprofessional.com/uk/lawyers-in-21st-century-societies-9781509915156/. We outline the parameters of both studies, focusing particularly on their methodology, and summarise some findings from the current study. We conclude by acknowledging the enormous debt this owes to Philip Lewis.

Introduction

As the initiators of the Lawyers in 21st Century Societies project, https://www.bloomsburyprofessional.com/uk/lawyers-in-21st-century-societies-9781509915156/, we owe Philip Lewis and Rick Abel a great intellectual debt. However, our starting point is personal. After a first career as a political scientist, Hilary re-trained to do law and in her short working life as a practising solicitor, became fascinated by legal culture and lawyers and it was this fascination that drove her to study the profession when she returned to academia. That research interest led her – inevitably – to Lawyers in Society (1988a, 1988b, 1989a). To her, starting out at the bottom in this academic field, Rick Abel and Philip Lewis were towering figures. And then, a few years later, at her first Working Group on the legal profession, she met Philip at the Bilbao Guggenheim, which he was visiting with Alan Paterson. Philip responded to Alan’s introduction by asking about and complimenting her on an article she had just written on the legal profession, which was of course a tremendous boost to her confidence. After that first encounter he continued to offer informal support and to show interest in her work.

Ole had just started his PhD on the Danish legal profession, when his supervisor, Margareta Bertilsson, lent him the three volumes Lawyers in Society. Philip’s (Lewis 1989) discussions of methodology and his inclusion of Giddens helped strengthen the focus of the thesis. Ole developed a database on Danish judges from 1900 to 2000 and, as a visitor of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, discussed databases and legal professions with Philip. The anxiety of meeting the great Oxford professor was shown to be groundless, when Philip invited him for lunch and showed a deep interest in databases, acknowledging that they could be a scientific game changer.¹ His general interest in the thesis was extremely supportive.

The original project

Lawrence Friedman has described Philip as always kind and generous to others, and, as both Hilary’s and Ole’s accounts illustrate, they had first-hand experience of those qualities. Friedman also described Philip as wise and deeply learned, noting the significance of his work for the social understanding of the legal profession. Of course he was referring to Philip’s whole body of work including his studies of Silicon Valley (Lewis 2019). However, the original and path breaking nature of Lawyers in Society makes this – we suggest – his most significant work. As Rick Abel has written, it was Philip who thought of the project, and he has described Philip’s contribution as “much greater than his superb scholarship. He constantly encouraged and guided the participants, bringing to it his broad knowledge and deep understanding of both law and the social sciences”.² It was Philip too who conceived of developing the project through a dedicated working group; he therefore, at the end of the 1970s, established the RCSL Working Group for Comparative Studies of Legal Professions – http://rcsl.iscte.pt/rcsl_wg_professions.htm. This first convened in 1980 when Philip launched the project. The work was then continued through further Working Group meetings and special panels at other conferences, in particular the annual meetings of the Law and Society Association (LSA). In addition to guiding the project and undertaking the editorial work (with Rick), Philip made a major contribution to the writing. He co-authored the prefaces to all three volumes, wrote the “Introduction” to Volume One: The Common Law World; a chapter on “Comparison and Change in the Study of Legal Professions” and co-authored, again with Rick, “Putting Law Back into the Sociology of Lawyers” in Volume Three: Comparative Theories. He also wrote the Preface (Lewis 1995) to the paperback update Lawyers in Society: An Overview (Abel and Lewis 1995).

The finished project vindicated Abbott’s warning that “thinking about professions developing independently [is] … foolish” (2001, p. 9). Together the three volumes demonstrated that it is only by considering both the domestic and global socioeconomic and cultural context that we can gain insight into the consequences for legal professionalism of the entanglement of different historical traditions with exogenous forces. It is difficult to over emphasise the difficulties involved in producing such an ambitious, connective sociology. In the absence of today’s research infrastructure of internet, online databases, registers and e-mails, the work represented a huge effort of collaborative scholarship which, apart from the face to face meetings, was undertaken through letters (with only the very rare, very expensive international phone call), and the use of snail mail for communicating and transmitting drafts which were written on typewriters, with corrections made with Wite-Out. Other difficulties included a lack of large scale quantitative data, and, since the sociology of legal professions was in its infancy, very few scholars were studying lawyers making it impossible to identify national reporters for some societies (Abel and Lewis 1988b, p. xi). There were therefore no accounts for Africa or the Middle East and few for Asia or Latin America, and entire systems, both political (socialist, in all its forms) and religious (e.g. Muslim) were omitted. Many lacunae were also due to the timing of the project. Thus, while the in-depth description of national professions made possible cross-national comparison, the development of an increasing body of transnational institutions and transnational practices was not discussed. Finally, apart from some travel support provided by the ABF, the project was largely unfunded until the Rockefeller Foundation invited the group to Bellagio.

However, the primary difficulties were methodological. Summarising the project as a comparative analysis of the histories and status of lawyers in both common law and civil law jurisdictions (Lewis 1988, p. 2), Philip devised – based on comparative sociology of law, comparative law and general sociology – elements of a comparative sociology of lawyers. This he described as “indiscriminate” since comparative method can prescribe neither the reasons for the specific research focus nor how the data it produces should be analysed (Lewis 1988, p. 30). This caution resonates with Durkheim’s argument (1982, pp. 147, 157) that comparison is the only method of study suitable for sociology since the researcher cannot control social phenomena. However, this uncontrollability, the result of the fluidity and consequently conceptual opacity of social phenomena, makes comparison an extraordinarily complex method, and we return to this below.

Furthermore, comparison is not just one strategy but consists of a variety of approaches, each with a particular set of functions and ambitions depending on the research objective (Azarian 2011, p. 115). Philip’s description of the project aim as the elucidation of “the demographic, economic, ideological and cultural background to the ways in which lawyers are organized and choose and carry on their work, as well as the changes that have affected or are likely to affect them” (Lewis 1988, p. 2) indicates that he conceptualised its methodology as a form of variation finding comparisons (Tilly 1984, p. 116), which, through comparison of multiple forms of a single phenomenon, seeks to unearth systematic differences among instances and establish a principle of variation in the character or intensity of that phenomenon (Azarian 2011, p. 118). Philip sought to do this by pointing to various elements that should be considered in the studies of lawyers.

Firstly, he argued that a double perspective should be adopted, taking into consideration not only distinct legal features but also those that are common to all professions (Abel and Lewis 1989b, p. 29) such as specialist knowledge and/or expertise. Secondly, he stipulated that lawyers should be examined in their total contexts, because although they

… may appear to be acting as individuals in relation to their clients, what they are doing cannot be fully understood unless we see them in an institutional context that includes not only courts and the surrounding environment of fellow lawyers and other players in the justice system … . (Lewis 1989, p. 28)

In addition to these material dimensions of the legal field, Philip highlighted the importance of considering the “more intangible intellectual, cultural and perhaps even normative, context, constructed by the intentional and unintentional acts of individuals and collectivities not just within but also outside the legal profession and the legal system” (Lewis 1989, p. 28). – a description of the scope of contextualisation that resonates with Geertz’s grounding of his semiotic methodology in culture, conceptualised as the webs of significance that “man” himself spins and in which he is suspended, mandating an interpretive analysis (Geertz 1993, p. 5).³

The need to place the phenomena under comparison in their context is stressed by other theorists; for instance, Smelser (2003, p. 647) argues that even though studies intend to compare identical projects, they end up comparing incomparable phenomena since social phenomena have to be understood in relation to their social contexts. In other words, the “variations in context destroy both the reliability and validity of common comparative measures” (Smelser 2003). This danger, inherent in comparative methodology, led Philip to caution that while “comparison implicitly assumes the separateness of what is being compared” (1989, p. 50), the objects of comparison needed grouping into categories “within which sufficient similarity can be assumed to permit the identification of meaningful differences” (1989, p. 51). Comparisons should therefore seek to trace the effect of a common stimulus on dissimilar but comparable professions. Acknowledging the difficulties this task posed, Philip wrote “we can only sharpen our awareness of differences in the training, occupational organization, use of legal knowledge, and other characteristics of the possible categories” (1989, p. 54). From this identification of different facets of the legal field, and drawing on structuration theory (Giddens 1984), Philip concluded that agents and institutions are always embedded in their social reality in a given time, carrying the social structures that both determine and are determined by their social contextual history. In this further echo of Geertz’s description of culture as a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms which frame possible action, Philip suggested that temporality and spatiality cannot be seen as either synchronic or diachronic. He therefore argued that comparisons should concentrate on the processes of historical development and the influences on professional formation and organisation and the nature of work, and specifically recommended that account be taken of the “‘intellectual legacy of imperialism’ and the common historical matrix in which legal professions came to be formed” (Giddens 1984, p. 57). For in practice of course, legal professions and the cultures in which they are embedded have always been subject to multiple cross-influences, and many are the product of European imperialism (see Sommerlad and Hammerslev 2020; Sommerlad et al. forthcoming).

As the foregoing discussion makes clear, theory development underpinned the aim of the Lawyers in Society project. The comparative methodology was not only deployed to elucidate convergent and divergent “facts” about national legal professions, but also to develop insights into the causal relationships responsible for the observed similarities and differences (May 1993, p. 157). Inevitably, the limitations faced by the project in assembling their sample of jurisdictions extended to its capacity for theory building. Nevertheless, the systematic comparative examination of the sample of jurisdictions, as logically independent instances of the same phenomenon, facilitated the mapping of fundamental similarities and differences between national professions. This exercise also achieved a further implicit objective of the comparative method, namely disrupting the taken for granted-ness of aspects of the dominant norm of the object of study, exposing its historical, spatial and temporal contingency. However this point brings us to the central complexity of comparative method – its grounding in ideal types and existing concepts most often generated in the West and exported to the rest of the world (Smelser 2003, p. 647). The term profession is exemplary. Despite recognition of the key role of imperialism in the formation of the profession, its generic use minimises the significance of its origins in the Western historical, cultural and political conditions which made lawyers’ claims credible and ensured the superiority of state consecrated normative judgements over competing ones (Cotterrell 1998, p. 177), and which have not been replicated elsewhere. Secondly, the term profession is an inherently unstable concept. Even within the Anglo-American field, where its distinctiveness has been primarily asserted, there is no consensus over its meaning beyond some basic characteristics (Saks 2012). For the functions of the profession require its institutional forms and practices to be fluid (“processual”: Bucher and Strauss 1961; Liu 2013), and professionalism is as much an ideological claim as an empirically grounded descriptor. Evidently there is a tension between this inherent conceptual instability and the technical precondition for comparative research of establishing a clear definition of its research objects. In other words, the opacity of the concept of legal profession makes it difficult to undertake meaningful comparison of the phenomena of legal professionalism and lawyers in societies with different histories, languages, state forms, political and legal systems, and cultural values. It raises questions about the possibility of unearthing systematic differences and similarities between these concepts, the institutional forms of which may not have clear defining boundaries. This fuzziness is exemplified and compounded by the proliferation of names and categories: while culturally specific terms such as ”attorney” and “solicitor” served to signal structural and functional differences, the sheer multiplicity of terms and categories, and of their context dependent meanings, hampered robust identification of commonalities and divergences in the social and political meaning of the profession.

Yet, as our discussion has indicated, engaging with the obscurity of that meaning, while also exploring the differentiated forms taken by professions by situating lawyers in the space–time conditions of the social systems in which they were embedded, was fundamental to the project’s comparative approach. And, returning to Durkheim’s point about the uncontrollability of social phenomena, ambiguity and confusion are integral to social science, inevitably problematising its need for comparison and generalisation. An excessive concern with establishing equivalence would make all comparative work impossible. Comparison therefore requires a conceptualisation that will work cross-culturally, but is neither too confining nor empty; in other words, identifying family resemblances by engaging in conceptual “travelling” rather than “stretching” (Sartori 1970). Abel and Lewis did this by deploying a definition with two components of legal professions, based, on the one hand, on a credential, and, on the other, on a set of functions.⁴ This essentially interpretive, constructivist approach (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Bourdieu et al. 1991; Krause 2016) made it possible to examine the jurisdictionally specific patterns taken by the professional project, and, by placing these in the broader framework of meanings within which the idea of legal profession sits – such as its socio-economic, cultural and political functions and its status project dimensions – to reach an understanding of the meaning attached to the term.

Despite – or because of – the difficulties sketched above (which we return to in the below discussion of Lawyers in 21st Century Societies), and the limitations that the variablity of the sample and its relatively small size posed for theory building, the collection made a seminal contribution to socio-legal research. The first two volumes delineated the key characteristics of professional institutions in common and civil law countries through reports on eighteen national professions. The distinctive relationships between lawyers, the state, civil society and the market, and the impact of national patterns of social stratification, culture and educational environment on the composition, practice and functions of the profession disclosed by these data were discussed in the introductory overviews to both volumes. They were then subjected to critical, comparative analysis in volume 3 through theoretical essays on education, gender, class, state formation, revolution, neo-corporatism, representation, and lawyering. In this way the project captured many of the processes which were beginning to de-construct the profession’s basic tenets, generating both its fragmentation and the beginning of a process of institutional isomorphism between national legal professions. This illumination of existing concepts and proposal of new relationships and conditions demonstrated the project’s rich interplay between theory and comparative method.

Before the collection was published, virtually the only work comparing legal professions was Rueschemeyer’s book on German and American lawyers (1973), Dias et al., Lawyers in the Third World (1981) and Larson’s (1977) and Abbott’s (1988) works on the theory of the professions. It is a mark of the ambition and richness of Lawyers in Society that it provided both a benchmark for assessing the strength of its theoretically grounded predictions concerning professional change and a resource, in the form of the country reports, for scholars to develop their own comparative frameworks and investigations. It therefore became the foundation of socio-legal research and teaching about lawyers for decades, initiating and nurturing comparative legal professions research by the Working Group over the last 30 years. In other words, the collection effectively created the field of international studies of lawyers in society.

Reasons for re-visiting the project

But despite representing a benchmark in the studies of the legal professions, the exponential changes which had driven the project meant, as Philip said to Hilary a few years ago, it was out of date before it had even been completed. The unprecedented rate of change which his comment referenced has, since 1988, accelerated and intensified and new drivers have emerged: most striking are the transformation of the world order as a result of the fall of the Soviet bloc; technological innovations; the intensification of neo-liberal globalisation; reconfigurations of nation states and civil society; diversification; the proliferation of normative orders and the financialisation of capitalism. In the words of Wes Pue “inherited professional forms” have been “daily assailed by forces associated with globalisation, the centrifugal pulls of the new market economy and the disintegration of cultural or national bonds” (Pue 1998, p. 127). Concurrently, new explanatory models have emerged. The neo-Weberian approaches to the profession which dominated the original project, have been challenged by new social theorising. Some of this scholarship reflects broader intellectual currents such as postmodern scepticism and the wider epistemological turn away from meta-narratives (Lyotard 1984, p. xxiv; Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito 2005), including, it is argued, the sociology of the professions (Gorman and Sandefur 2011, p. 281). Other theoretical developments reflect the transformation in the profession’s structure, markets and demographic profiles since 1988, and encompass such new approaches as neo-institutionalism (e.g. Muzio et al. 2013), the application to the professions of a rich scholarship drawn from other fields, such as feminist studies (e.g. Thornton 1996; Sommerlad 2016) and Critical race Theory (CRT) (e.g. Carbado and Gulati 2000), and approaches inspired by Foucault (e.g. Fournier 1999) and Bourdieu (e.g. Dezalay and Garth 2002). This breadth and extent of change led us, at the 2014 meeting of the Working Group in Frauenchiemsee, Germany, to suggest that the 1988/89 project should be revisited as a “thirty year after the original project” celebration; Ulrike Schultz lent her full support to the idea, and we subsequently recruited Rick.

Like the original collection, the current project comprises national reports and a second, thematic volume. Several factors enabled us to assemble a larger sample of reporters than the original collection: 76 colleagues from 46 (rather than the original 19) jurisdictions drawn from Africa and the Middle-East, Latin America, Asia, North America, Europe and former communist countries. We adopted the original project’s working methods: contributions have been presented and discussed at the biennial Working Group meetings; conferences of the LSA (having been granted the status of an International Research Collaborative (IRC)), and of the ISA & RSCL; in addition a special workshop at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati in 2017. In February this year Lawyers in 21st Century Societies Vol 1: National Reports https://www.bloomsburyprofessional.com/uk/lawyers-in-21st-century-societies-9781509915156/ was published.

We are now nearing completion of the companion volume in which 45 scholars from a wide variety of disciplines (law, sociology, political science, management, and history) make use of the reports and other data to engage in cross-national comparisons (in Africa, Asia, former communist countries, Latin America, and the Islamic world) and address a wide variety of theoretical and substantive issues. Some of these issues refer back to the original 1988 collection and are thus central to understanding how law and the profession have developed during the last 30 years. Comparative categories are addressed including state production, regional bodies and international courts, large law firms, access to justice, technology, legal education, the construction of law, ethics and regulation, casualisation, cause lawyering, and corruption. There are also chapters which specifically focus on gender, masculinity and ethnicity. These themes are contextualised through a chapter on the rule of law and chapters which compare developments in the legal, medical and accountancy professions.

Methodological challenges

As we have indicated, the challenges outlined above which comparative work poses also generate valuable insights. Thus the changes which drove our interest in revisiting the project made an approach based on legal families and the nation state increasingly problematic, since, like the classical profession itself, the separation of those families was historically specific. They are now all almost inextricably entangled, reflecting the impact of globalisation on the nation state (Sassen 1999) and on legal monism. However this complexity also highlights the value of the in-depth national reports. Their data justify Philip’s strictures on the need to situate the profession in its total context, which today includes both the globalised and national field, and to historicise how different professions, and fractions of professions, have been affected by such drivers – identified above – as technological innovation, the financialisation of capitalism and the proliferation of normative orders.

Exploring the commonalities and irregularities produced by these drivers resurrected the difficulty of developing a workable concept of profession; self evidently they have accentuated the difficulty of basing it on the Western regulatory model which grounds professional status in possession of a state-recognised credential and performance of particular institutional functions. Non Western societies have been characterised by other understandings of the meaning of law and lawyers, while the near ubiquity of neo-liberal marketisation of the professional field has meant that even in the West, de-regulation is now common. On the other hand, this two-part conceptualisation conforms both to public understandings of profession and its usage by social scientists, historians and ordinary citizens in most developed economies. Furthermore, across the world some sectors of the profession have also been undergoing a process of isomorphism (e.g. Corporate law) and family resemblances between different legal professions in terms of their functions, practices and ideological claims also persist. The increasingly complex structural and functional differentiation characteristic of both the new globalised socio-economic order and domestic arenas means that rules and procedural systems are needed more than ever to deal with social “co-ordination problems” (Finnis 1980, pp. 245–252) and the professions’ “scientifically” grounded form of esoteric but socially useful knowledge equips them to contribute to solving these problems (Olgiati 2010; Muzio et al. 2013). Consequently, both national and international socio-economic orders continue to rest on many of the key functions traditionally exercised by lawyers, and their performance of these functions therefore remains an active property of the field, enabling some to retain vestiges of the profession’s traditional market and authority. We therefore reprised the two part functions/ credentials definition adopted for the 1988 project.

However, achieving greater and more nuanced definitions remain central aims of our comparative work, and so we worked relationally with categories, open to contextual interpretations. In addition to the professional category, other institutional categories such as “the state” and “bar associations” were also examined in relation to the specific national fields of power rather than evaluating them from a western perspective. Consequently, we posed questions to our national reporters which aimed to illuminate the logics and forms of practices that define the contemporary field and which help to (re)produce and legitimise the status of the profession, and thus give it meaning; in other words, again following the original project, our epistemological framework was constructivist.

How we applied this approach

As we wrote in our introduction to Volume 1 (Sommerlad and Hammerslev 2020), legal professions and theorisations of them develop and circulate interdependently, thus it is only through connective sociology (Bhambra 2016) that we can understand the dynamics that shape them. Our sample encompasses countries that have experienced multiple ruptures – from colonialism to independence, communism to capitalism and civilian to military rule – as well as tensions between secular and religious law and authorities. This variety required us to allow contributors to develop research questions appropriate to their particular jurisdictions, ie a “federated” approach (Felstiner 2005, p. 1) where the national reports took into account common features but also concerns specific to their countries. This approach gave an overall direction of the project, but ensured that it was still open to (unforseen) variations depending on the national fields of power and their transnational relations.

However, since our approach has its background in connective sociology, we needed to find signifiers that could lay a base for initial comparisons. We therefore asked our reporters to provide information that would indicate contours of change, such as the number of lawyers, legal educational institutions and “big law” firms (indicating the expansion of legal professions in which an increasing number of actors compete); how lawyers are selected; which people become lawyers and what kinds they become; how legal education and educational debt are shaping lawyers’ behaviour and careers; how lawyers are regulated; the structures within which they practice, and how these influence lawyer behaviour (e.g. employment versus independence, multidisciplinary partnerships); access to justice by government (e.g. legal aid) and philanthropy (e.g. pro bono services); the impact of IT on the practice of law and access to justice; how globalisation (political, economic, cultural) is reshaping the legal profession; how lawyers promote (or violate) the rule of law. Secondly, we aimed to reconstruct the categories of professions and the state (among others): through historicisation (and comparison) we sought to explore how objective relations between legal professionals and their competitors and the symbolic meaning of such power hierarchies and categories of perception contributed to their formation (Geertz 1993). We therefore asked reporters to discuss developments over the last 30–40 years, and some reporters went even further back in the histories of their professions in order to convey how it assumed its contemporary form.

In other words, our approach was “mixed” method, drawing on deductive, structural findings which emphasise the range of sites, coupled with inductive, often more qualitative findings that delved into the nature of the experience of working at a particular type of site. In the following section we present a brief outline of some of the national reports’ findings.

Volume 1: the national reports

Some national reporters hewed closely to our research agenda, but others followed their own theoretical and empirical interests – highlighting the socio-institutional complexity and contingency of different jurisdictions and the significance of their histories in shaping their articulation with global capital and the reconfiguration of their professions. So, on the one hand the reports conveyed the extent to which the interlinked dimensions of the Western professional paradigm which equipped it for its central role in the Western nation state were eroding by 1988 as the institutional forms of both nation states and the global order were transforming. The data indicates how such fundamental traditional characteristics as professional autonomy (and the illusion of objectivity) have eroded, and the doxa of the legal field has been challenged by the discourse of entrepreneurialism, which has re-shaped the logics and organisational practices of the corporate legal sector, and, in many jurisdictions, marketised the legal academy. But the reports also highlighted the extent to which the contemporary legal fields are everywhere splintered and the meaning of the profession contested. For instance the data revealed how contemporary jurisdictions and professions continue to be patterned by social hierarchies and yet how traditional ideals of justice, equity and the rule of law continue to inspire some lawyers, who are prepared, at great risk to their lives (or livelihoods), to struggle for social justice. The result is a fluid, “messy” social reality.

Yet all the national reports indicate that the forces of globalisation and neoliberalism, together with other macro-level developments such as technological innovations and the disintegration of cultural or national bonds, have ruptured state-centric governance and traditional understandings of lawyers’ functions and credentialing, and below we sketch out what they indicated about the variations in impact of globalisation.

In the West (or Global North) the common law world was the vanguard in embracing globalisation and neoliberal policies. By contrast the statism of the civil law professions and traditions of other Western societies made them initially more resistant to the market imperatives of globalisation. Even so, all reports on Western professions noted the growing hegemony of market discourses and de-regulation and how the disintegrative impact on the profession mirrors wider social polarisation. The Dutch report reported an increased hybridity of its legal services market resulting from mergers and associations of law firms with other legal service providers and the emergence of other service providers (e.g. accounting firms opening legal departments). Yet exceptions to this development reminded us of the continual need for attentiveness to the impact of different historical legacies, even within a relatively homogenous geographical and cultural space like Western Europe. This need to nuance generalisation was exemplified by, for instance, the continuing predominance of sole practitioners and small firms in Germany, whose profession appears to have resisted “Europeanisation”, largely preserving its “guild-like” status, and of the family firm in Italy.

The varied nature and impact of liberalisation and globalisation and the relevance of previous power structures are illustrated by the former Soviet bloc’s integration into the new global order. The commercialisation of legal services in Russia is described as “intense”, leading to a proliferation of unlicensed practitioners who provide their services through commercial entities like limited liability companies and individual enterprises while lacking any professional attributes, such as educational and work credentials, an ethical code, licences, associations, or even a specific title. The Czech Republic provides another illustration of how insertion into the global system generated unregulated and highly predatory forms of capitalism and legal practice.

In China, as in Russia, modernisation and economic growth rather than political liberalism drove reform. Restrictions on handling “Chinese legal affairs” limited foreign law firms’ expansion, stimulating the development of local firms, and the lawyer population virtually tripled between 2000 and 2017. However, politically embedded lawyers continue to enjoy significant advantages in their practice, including greater business opportunities. This state-centric model of development is the norm throughout the region; one of its primary functions is to manage the articulation of two apparently contradictory modalities of social relations: pre-modern, patron-client relations of reciprocity, manifest in the significance of political embeddedness, and the development of Anglo-American style professions and rule of law reforms.

The Indonesian profession is exemplary: on one hand, globalisation has promoted human rights, stimulating public interest litigation and civil society organisations while also generating the growth of the sector that serves the globalised world of investment, business and finance; on the other, the traditional “fixer who cares little about law and uses any means, including bribes and thugs, to resolve the client’s problem” remains a feature of the profession. South Korea’s incorporation into the US informal empire shaped its globalising policies from the 1980s, leading to the importation of American legal professionalism and consequent modification of traditional legal professions. At the same time, lawyers’ sense of social responsibility and commitment to the rule of law and human rights were stimulated by the “candlelight revolution” against state authoritarianism: lawyers played pivotal roles, helping citizens understand the constitution and impeachment process and challenging those lawyers more closely aligned with state power.

Many of these features and patterns of development – including the emergence of an external facing corporate/commercial/international sector and of human rights lawyers, and the struggles between those who challenge the state versus those who are politically embedded – characterise other non-Western states. For instance, our group of North African and Middle Eastern countries continue to be marked by their colonial past, exemplified by the co-existence of Western style professions and jurisprudence with pre-modern Islamic systems and the conjunction of strong authoritarian states, a profession that lacks autonomy, and close relationships between ruling powers and the state. Mixed legal systems deriving from the colonial past also co-exist with Sharia courts in Libya, Iran and Egypt. By contrast Tunisia’s colonial legacy includes its French civil law system and a secular tradition – Sharia courts are used only in some family cases.

The influence of colonial history on the response to and relationship with global capital and neoliberal policies is also evident in Latin America, which is again characterised by mixed legal systems (generally borrowed from continental traditions and, more recently, the US), weak civil society institutions, and the importance of patronage. Democratic and rule of law reforms have been impeded by US informal colonialism and military dictatorship; yet these reforms have also stimulated strong human rights movements, exemplified by participation in international instruments such as the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights. Public interest law clinics were established in Argentina, as they have been in Chile following its liberalisation over the last two decades, similarly transforming lawyers into spokespersons on rights issues.

However, globalisation’s impact on the (legitimation) crisis of democracy is also reported: the growing importance of extra-national rule creation and enforcement has multiplied the loci within which legal professionals may act but simultaneously limited the regulatory capacity of domestic democratic institutions by allowing external deliberation. The history of Venezuela and its legal profession resembles that of other Latin American states in its asymmetrical relationships with global capital, oligarchic politics and struggles for democracy. The legal profession (which, as elsewhere, has undergone a dramatic expansion) extended along a spectrum from the international corporate sector to human rights lawyers and “revolutionary lawyers” produced by government-sponsored law schools, and large numbers of Venezuelan lawyers have left the country.

Our Sub-Saharan African sample was again characterised by the co-existence of Western systems of law (facilitating the persistence of asymmetrical relationships with global capital) and traditional dispute resolution processes in “a fabric of pluralism”. In South Africa the role played by a handful of lawyers in the struggle against apartheid exemplifies the split between law’s functional significance for capitalism and the state and its capacity to act as a tool for and symbol of social justice. However, the inequalities stemming from prioritising the drive to meet the demands of the global economy are mirrored in the divisions within the legal profession between the corporate and private client sectors. The failure to fulfil the post-apartheid promise of social democracy has stimulated the current de-colonisation movement, which includes greater efforts to diversify the profession.

The trajectories of the legal professions of Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya have been shaped by a range of factors. These encompassed indigenisation as governments sought to create national professions following Independence; oscillations between dictatorship and moves to establish liberal democratic institutions and the rule of law; political manipulation and patronage to control and destabilise Bar associations, causing intense internal friction and reducing lawyers’ moral authority; and the significance of both human rights and economic globalisation. Burundi offers an extreme example of the trends that characterise the legal field in the Global South. Dezalay explains how external interests and interventions have produced a patrimonial state built on ethnic affiliation and extraversion. She shows how this (typically colonial) intensely bureaucratic state contributed to the rising demand for lawyers and how massacres, wars and dictatorship generated formidable investment by NGOs from the mid-1990s, focused on reforming a justice sector seen as both a root cause of the 1993 massacres and a potential vector for peace and development. As a result, the domestic market suffers from “a double bind: dependent on and vulnerable to the volatile demand from international donors and organisations and weakened as a buffer between international diplomacy and a repressive government” (Dezalay 2020, p. 490).

Of course, the above represents just a snapshot of the national reports’ data on responses to globalisation – they contain rich data on the many other drivers affecting contemporary professions.

Conclusion

Our aim in this project, as in the 1988–1989 collections, was to explore transformations and continuities of legal professions through a comparative, connective sociology of contemporary legal professions, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of their current forms, meaning(s) and roles. Philip’s original idea and work generated an agenda which has guided us and which, following the implicit underlying theme of the contingency of the profession, has generated concern with new issues such as diversity and AI. Our dedication to Volume 1 therefore reads:

To Philip S.C. Lewis, who founded the Working Group for Comparative Study of Legal Professions and guided it through publication of the three volumes of Lawyers in Society.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In fact, with Rick and the WG members, Philip had developed an inventory of the data which each national report should include. They did this iteratively over several years (in the preliminary meetings before Bellagio): as reports were drafted, they modified the checklist.

2 Personal communication

3 The precise way in which Geertz described his approach is as follows: “Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1993, p. 5).

4 In this they were influenced by Rueschemeyer’s (1989, p. 298) rejection of definitions grounded in either legal knowledge or institutional activity, since the former could encompass too broad a range of workers (e.g. the police) and the latter could exclude those generally considered legal professionals by the profession or state. However, their adoption of the two part definition essentially takes the Western model as its reference point, and thus, as Munger argues (forthcoming), risks reducing the legal professions of new states to imperfect copies of a Western original, overlooking fundamental differences in the way law is mobilized by unique mediators under very different regimes of state authority.