Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This chapter situates the examination of Nordic lawyers in this book within the broader scholarship on lawyer’s engagement with politics and liberalism. It charts firstly the revisionist body of scholarly work in the 1970s that challenged the conventional understanding that the legal profession enjoyed the status of a “high calling”. Instead, the legal profession was overwhelming devoted to protecting and expanding its privileges and prestige. This realist conception is later moderated by some scholars who make the more modest claim that legal complexes emerge to fight for political liberalism—a narrow set of civil rights, a moderate state, and space for civil society. This perspective generated a range of country and cross-country studies where they found conditional evidence for the claim. The authors in this chapter introduce a new iteration—a focus on the Nordic countries—a deviant case giving the suggestive evidence that lawyers did not mobilize for political liberalism. The authors summarize briefly in this chapter that Nordic lawyers who acted collectively played no or little role in the establishment of the modern liberal states in the Nordic countries in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It mentions a bricolage of other actors that were central, vocal, and influential in the establishment of political liberalism during the course of the nineteenth century. It also explains that liberalism in the Nordic countries was influenced by Enlightenment ideas advanced in France, Germany, and England, and was given momentum by the American and French Revolutions. The chapter hints at a factor that accounts for the relative absence of lawyers in the public arena. It points out that Nordic legal professions were poorly organized until well into the nineteenth century, long after major strides were made in establishing political liberalism. In addition, the authors note that this negative finding permits new reflections on the legal complex theory and the authors discuss an alternative approach which is raised in the volume—based on rational choice theory rather than constructivism.