Sociological Perspectives on Social Change and the Role of Learned Law: Building on and Going beyond Berman and Bourdieu (original) (raw)

THE HISTORICAL LAWYER AND THE GOALS OF LEGAL EDUCATION

Zbornik Pravnog fakulteta u Zagrebu, 2022

Sloppy education results in misdirected graduates. We need to see legal education as a matter of shaping in adepts something that can be called caliber of intellect. It is referring to the university formation of a way of thinking and of perceiving the world that distinguishes legal studies from any other intellectual or scientific preparation. The author argues that legal education in the main must ensure that graduates are historical lawyers. There are two occupational paths open to law graduates, that of practitioners and that of scholars. The vast majority choose to be practitioners. Law adopts not only a dogmatic or comparative legal perspective, but also a historical perspective of discourse and argumentation. The users of this argumentation—and, one might say, everyone who appreciates it—are, on the strength of this fact, historical lawyers. Law is in a constant process of historical development, therefore a historical lawyer is a realist lawyer. The historical lawyer, with his awareness of the inevitable successive changes in the law, has no illusions as to the immutability of specific regulations, and is consequently more able to estimate the spectrum of such changes and what future amendments might entail. He is aware of the mistakes of the past and can thus take care to avoid them in the future—and, hopefully, help others to avoid them, too.

Origin and historical differentiation of the roles of lawyers

Jogelméleti Szemle

The European legal systems and the professional judicial roles have their beginning from the discovery of the collections of Justinianus and the emergence of the teaching of law in Bologna in 1100 and in the modern epoch of the last two centuries the differentiated judicial roles of lawyer, of judicially trained judge and of legal scholar are common. This differentiation has been going on for several centuries, and by the middle of the 19th century, differentiated legal roles already existed in most European countries. It is generally known that this development had its basis and its starting point in the Roman law, but the amazing parallelism of the thousand-year legal development of the Romans with the subsequent eight-hundred-year development of the law in the continental European countries perhaps did not receive such a strong emphasis in the literature. In the first part of this small paper I intend to sketch the emergence and differentiation of the jurist roles among the Romans during their thousand years of legal history, and the sketch to the parallel development of the last centuries starting from 1100 in Bologna is to be read in the second part.

Lawyers and the Vital Relationship between the Past and the Present

German Law Journal

is composed of numerous interesting essays (21 essays in total) and, in the time at my disposal, I shall not be able to expound on them with the care and attention that they merit. Consequently, I shall be able to mention only some of the relevant topics that this book addresses. My general impression is that we have before us an important, original, and complicated book. It is a book that does not run the risk of mingling in the mass of the works devoted to the past, the present, and the future of Europe. It is a book centered on an original and, in some ways, disturbing hypothesis: the hypothesis that the relationship between the twentieth century totalitarian regimes and the liberal and democratic traditions may be different from a mere antithesis, as our common sense tends to suppose.

Legal Revolutions, Cosmopolitan Legal Elites, and Interconnected Histories

Law as Reproduction and Revolution: An Interconnected History

The global rise of financial capitalism and neoliberal economics over the past thirty to forty years has helped produce a "legal revolution" (Berman 1983) in much of the world. Tangible results of this process include the proliferation of large corporate law firms-a US invention-in the major capitals of the world and, more recently, a trend toward legal education reform geared toward those corporate law firms and US approaches to legal education. The current legal revolution, like the earlier one in the United States, is associated with a modernist commitment to meritocracy, which can be deployed against entrenched legal elites-even oligarchies-held together by family or quasi-familial capital. The strong impact of this revolution is apparent in the major countries of Asia, including the subjects of this study-China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, and South Korea. Our book is about this revolution and the very different ways it is playing out in those countries. But it is also about how such revolutions both attack legal hierarchies and are central to their reproduction. Richard Abel's well-known work on the legal profession emphasized professional control of markets and "the production of producers" (e.g., Abel and Lewis 1989-90) as keys to the success of the profession. In contrast, we argue that control of the production (and reproduction) of producers is applied mainly to protect those at the top of the legal hierarchies. In other words, the key strategy is not so much to restrict internal and external competition through monopoly and limited entry into the profession; rather, it is to enforce an internal hierarchy that reserves access to the top positions to a cosmopolitan elite blessed, most typically, with inherited legal capital and degrees from highly selective schools. Such elites include descendants of the French "noblesse de robe, " notable "jurists" in Brazil, high court advocates and judges in India, and, in places like China, Japan, and South Korea, families with sufficient resources that their children will excel on national examinations and rise to the most respected positions.

Legal Knowledge as Social and Political Capital

AJIL Unbound

The 150th anniversary of the Institut de Droit International (IDI) and the International Law Association (ILA) provides an opportunity to assess the role of legal scholarship in the codification and institutionalization of international law. This essay argues that academic expertise is a form of social and political capital that is at once individual, institutional, and structural. Empirically focused on international dispute settlement mechanisms (interstate adjudication and arbitration), this essay underscores that academic expertise shapes the professional status of international lawyers, and influences the clout of international institutions as codifiers of international law.