You're out of order! Legal culture and contemporary sophists? (original) (raw)
Related papers
Lawyers, Rule of Law, and Social Justice: A Latin American Prespective
2011
This paper deals with two important ideas: rule of law and social justice. The question is whether these are values for lawyers and the legal system. Both concepts have a long history given that they are related to the idea of justice and a philosophical tradition going back to ancient Greece. However, my approach is to treat these ideas in terms of their present meaning and to avoid the philosophical depths by examining them from a social sciences perspective. Given the subject, however, some references to great philosophers are nevertheless inevitable. The preliminary issue I have to deal with is whether lawyers have values at all. The profession is the victim of cruel jokes that present lawyers as soulless and greedy people. According to one of these jokes, lawyers differ from prostitutes because prostitutes sometimes do it for love. In this regard, Marc Galanter has analyzed occupational or professional jokes as a way of counteracting the perceived importance of a profession in society. This is the reason his book is entitled Lowering the Bar (Galanter 2005, 9-15). In the early nineteenth century the most frequent victims of jokes were priests, whose profession was of great importance at that time. If jokes seek to cut down the powerful by revealing common deviant behavior in a profession, they also delineate the normative self-image of the profession. Jokes are like excuses. The person who offers an excuse is confessing the infraction of a norm but at the same time is reaffirming the norm (Austin 1979, 175-204). Jokes have a similar social function: they refer to a deviation from-and at the same time reaffirm-the norm. * Law School Dean at the Universidad Metropolitana in Caracas. Former Academic Director, International Institute for the Sociology of Law (Onati, Spain). I thank Prof. Mariana Hernández Crespo and the students of the University of St. Thomas School of Law for the invitation to deliver this paper in Minneapolis in March, 2008. I thank S. Lemke for her patience correcting my English and editing suggestions. I thank also the editors of the University of St. Thomas Law Journal for their helpful comments. [At the author's request, all references have been formatted according to The Chicago Manual of Style as a social science work.
The Lawyers’ Reality: Wrongdoing in Spain in the Era of Codification (with Matthew Dyson)
Writing Wrongdoing: Spain 1800-1936, Samuel Llano and Alison Sinclair (eds.), London: Tamesis, 2017
This chapter will attempt to introduce the lawyers’ construction of wrongdoing and the relationship between that view and society’s view in the period from 1800 to 1936. It will consider in turn the topics of constitutionalism and codification, the unity of criminal law, the objects of the criminal law and the punishments of the criminal law. In so doing it will serve as an introduction to the way that wrongdoing was conceived of over this period. It will also provide a context for seeing how wrongdoing was responded to. This legal perspective is arguably fed by, but certainly feeds back into, non-legal contemporary views of wrongdoing. The chapter will focus on formal legal sources, especially the criminal codes of the period.
AT THE 2002 SEMINAR IN LATIN AMERICA ON CONSTITUTIONAL AND POLITIcal Theory (SELA, by its Spanish acronym), someone, I think a Chiean, accused Esteban Restrepo and perhaps Colombian constitutionalists as a group, of "magical legalism". He said that our constant celebration of the 1991 Constitution was at best odd, and, at worse, deluded, considering the persistence of social violence, internal conflicts, declining social indicators, and the historic restriction of democracy in Colombia. Ever since that night, I have been wondering whether he was right; whether there is something strange in our fondness for constitutional law in general, and with rights in particular.
Revista de Estudos Empíricos em Direito, 2016
This article is about the field of socio-legal studies and the sociology of the field. This division enables working with two dimensions of the author’s socio-legal scholarly personality, especially as it relates to Brazil. It is going to try to describe, not prescribe, and the description is very preliminary. It is in part meant to provoke responses and criticisms that will make the description better. Part one examines the rise and to some extent fall of the field of socio-legal studies in the United States. Part two will examine and make a preliminary contrast to a kind of parallel and contrasting story in Brazil. Part three moves to a different approach, a more sociological approach, focusing on lawyers as a point of entry into issues of law and state. Part four is the most tentative part of this talk as it a very preliminary contrast of the U.S. story with what I know preliminarily about Brazil in relation to the same issues of the place of law, elite production, hegemony, and...
Ph.D. Dissertation, 2018
This dissertation is a social, political, and cultural history of the organized Chilean legal profession in the first half of the twentieth century. It explores the causes for the creation of the Chilean Bar Association and its Legal Aid Service in the mid-1920s and follows their evolution until the mid-1960s. The relative success of the Bar Association in imposing its model of lawyering in the first half of the twentieth century allows us to understand why the legalistic framework that Chilean lawyers had inherited from the nineteenth century did not change over the course of the twentieth despite the momentous social and political evolution that both profession and country experienced in this period. The history of the Chilean Bar Association thus provides an institutional explanation for the continuity of ideas about the law in the face of accelerated social transformations. At the same time, by revealing the tensions and the resistance that this project faced, the history of the Bar also reveals the gears that would eventually lead to the legal profession’s historical change.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The cover photo of this book was photographed by the first coeditor Juan Antonio Le Clercq who granted permission to use his photo in his own book. The photographer retains the copyright.