Room at the Top? A Story of Permanent Revolution
Legal professions across the world display two enduring characteristics: domination by relatively small kinship groups and class fractions; and a symbiotic relationship between their elites and governments. The explanation for these characteristics can be found in the extraordinarily ambitious and fascinating book Law as Reproduction and Revolution: An Interconnected History, the triumphant culmination of decades of Dezalay and Garth’s studies of the global legal profession.
They begin by describing the ‘legal revolution’ generated by the global rise of financial capitalism and neoliberal economics, and the threat that its associated meritocratic commitment poses to entrenched legal elites. However, the social closure based on familial and economic capital persists. For Dezalay and Garth, this is primarily designed to enforce an internal hierarchy, dominated by a cosmopolitan elite with inherited legal capital and degrees from highly selective schools, rather than to assure the institution’s success (p.3). Their argument is informed by Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction and Berman’s theory of legal revolution, in which established elites are challenged by aspirants who have invested in new knowledge and forged alliances with emerging political forces. These explanatory models are drawn upon in a series of case studies of a range of jurisdictions, spanning Europe, Asia and the US, to explore how legal elites retain their professional dominance and play key roles in geo-political change, with a particular focus on the relationship of legal oligarchies in Asian countries to the current, neo-liberal revolution.
This analytical framework demands a historical and biographical methodology, therefore Dezalay and Garth’s account begins with medieval Bologna, where a cosmopolitan legal elite reconfigured itself as a professional force, and was central to the conversion of feudal power into modern state forms. They then deploy case studies to illustrate and nuance Berman’s theory to capture the complexity of socio-economic and political change. Following Bourdieu’s insight into the competing and complementary relationship between social and learned capital and between lawyers and the state, they show how the enduring significance of social, familial, and cultural capital, together with a willingness to adapt to new criteria of significance such as merit, enables traditional elites to persist.
Drawing on Benton and Ford, Dezalay and Garth also point to the impact of geopolitics on the connections between elite reproduction and social change. The example given is the increased investment in legal expertise in colonial governance which resulted from heightened imperial competition. As their account of these conjoined global histories moves into the last few decades, the focus switches to US hegemony, manifest in the global spread of large corporate law firms and US-inspired legal education. Following the book’s thesis, this development is not interpreted as simply the result of a demand for the services of these firms or global isomorphism. Rather, it is conceptualised as a legal revolution related to global hegemonic power; hierarchies in national legal fields created out of the older European empires and the role of challengers drawing on law emanating from the United States to build their positions; and established elites’ resistance to these moves.
The book’s methodological approach makes it a major contribution to Bhambra’s ‘connected sociologies’, which critiques the traditional, Eurocentric account of the rise of capitalist modernity for its failure to address the broader colonial and imperial context. Yet, despite the references to issues of colonialism and empire, these, together with the key significance of class, gender, race, and religious difference in shaping modern legal professions and their elites, could have received more attention.
Similarly, it is possible to overstate the significance of legal elites. As Marx argued in his articles on class struggles in France, to understand the dynamics of change we need to recognise how the process of modernisation is contoured by different fractions within the bourgeoisie. Inevitably, the more sweeping the account of social change, the more difficult it is to capture this complexity, as Dezalay and Garth acknowledge. We might, therefore, consider other theorisations of social change, such as Stuart Hall’s conjunctural analysis of the complex structures and forces operative within a given historical moment of change (or continuity), which he deployed to discern the political, ideological, cultural, and economic forces that shaped 1970s Britain. This lens makes it possible to focus more on the emergent social and political formations that shape the terrain of struggle and the conditions of a hegemonic programme in any given jurisdiction. However, this is to suggest an entirely different sort of book: were we to engage in this more microscopic approach, we would lose the fascinating insights that grand theory grounded in a macro-level overview such as this produces.
Law as Reproduction and Revolution is a novel and enlightening piece of comparative scholarship that should encourage Socio-Legal scholars of the legal profession to interrogate their approach to the interconnections between the profession, power, and social change.
About the Author
Professor Hilary Sommerlad
Professor of Law & Social Justice, University of Leeds
Hilary Sommerlad is Professor of Law & Social Justice & co-directs the Legal Professions Research Group at the University of Leeds. Following a history degree and PhD in Political Science, she retrained in law and practised as a legal aid solicitor. The primary focus of her research is the legal profession, and particular interests include diversity and citizenship.