Reaching Out

Abstract

Lawyers are professionals (defined by credentials based on education, experience, and examinations) who administer state-made rules. The divisions into private practitioners, corporate employees, civil servants, judges, and prosecutors are organized in fundamentally different ways in common and civil law countries (which derive their legal systems from either England or continental Europe), socialist regimes, and the Islamic world. Countries differ in those aspects of social life they submit to law and thus to the ministrations of lawyers. Lawyers became a profession by controlling entry, primarily through the state and universities in the civil law world, more through apprenticeship and self-imposed limitations on private practice in the common law. They restrict competition among producers by banning advertising, fixing prices, dividing functions, and regulating the size and structure of the productive unit. Recently they have sought to create demand, collectively (legal aid and private insurance) and individually (advertising). Although lawyers have not been proletarianized in the sense of being deskilled, relations of production increasingly resemble those of the classic capitalist firm. As professionals, lawyers insist on regulating and governing themselves. Both powers have been challenged by consumers and the state and threatened by deepening internal divisions.