Lawyers in 21st-Century Societies: Volume 1: National Reports (original) (raw)

Angeles decided to launch an international comparative project on the history, constitution and role of lawyers in society. After preliminary meetings at conferences of the Law and Society Association (LSA) and the International Sociological Association ' s Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL), the group gathered for a week in the summer of 1984 at the Rockefeller Foundation ' s Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, ultimately producing the three volumes on Lawyers in Society : one on the common law world, one on the civil law world, and one on comparative theories (Abel and Lewis 1988a; 1988b; 1989; 1995). These pathbreaking books became the foundation of socio-legal research and teaching about lawyers for decades. Because the successful collaboration created an intense identifi cation with a common intellectual enterprise, the contributors decided to found a Working Group (WG) on Comparative Studies of Legal Professions within the framework of the RCSL. The WG has met biennially since 1986, mainly in France, and has a blog; 1 its work is described on the RCSL website. 2 The WG has grown from the 32 contributors to the original volumes to more than 300 members, 60-70 of whom attend any given meeting. Developments in various countries are presented and discussed in the WG ' s 12 subgroups on Ethics and Deontology; Family, Policy and the Law; International Lawyering and Large Law Firms; Judiciary; Lawyers and Clients; Legal Aid; Legal Education; Legal Professional Values and Identities; Regulatory Reform; Women/Gender in the Legal Profession; Histories of Legal Professions; and Lawyers and Imperialism. This collaborative enterprise has produced many monographs, articles and international comparative volumes, including three comprehensive books on women in the legal profession (Schultz and Shaw 2003; 2013; Schultz et al 2019). Several subgroups have held their own meetings, often as workshops at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) in O ñ ati. William Felstiner (2005), then WG chair, published an update of changes in ten countries. At the fi fteenth WG meeting in Frauenchiemsee, Germany, Hilary Sommerlad and Ole Hammerslev suggested that, given the dramatic transformation of the geo-political order since 1989 and its impact on national societies and their legal professions, the 1988/89 project should be revisited. Ulrike Schultz, then WG chair and contributor to the 1988/89 volumes, lent her full support, and the three of them recruited Richard Abel. Because socio-legal scholarship has fl ourished globally in the intervening three decades, we have been able to involve colleagues from many more countries (46 rather than the original 19), viii Preface including categories that were omitted or barely covered: Africa and the Middle-East, Latin America, Asia, and former communist countries. This new project has been greatly facilitated by the enormous technological improvements since the time when contributors wrote on typewriters, corrected with Wite-Out, rarely made the very expensive international phone calls, and were limited to snail mail for communicating and transmitting drafts. The contributions have been presented and discussed at the annual LSA confer