Politics of Lawyers

A new agenda has emerged for studies of legal professions. It asserts that politics matter. The agenda arises from two sources, one scholarly, one from political events. From the scholarly side, both the sociology of profes­sions more generally and the sociology of the legal profession have ignored politics almost entirely from the 1950s through the late 1980s.1 The most influential theory among law and society scholars has given lawyers' mar­kets primacy as the institution of inquiry. Extensive studies of lawyers' social organization, work, careers, and gender have all contributed to a lively ex­pansion of the research domain, but politics has featured virtually nowhere, except for the occasional study of lawyers as legislators—and that has never proved a very fruitful line of inquiry.

In the mid-1980s, several studies appeared in the United States on the politics of leading bar associations, including research by Powell (1988) on the New York City Bar and my own study of the Chicago Bar Association (Halliday 1987). Sociologists in several other countries (Burrage in Britain, Karpik in France, and Siegrist in Germany) began magisterial studies that placed political revolutions, political action, and political goals at the center of their inquiry. In addition, two historians, Daniel Bell on eighteenth-century  France,  and  Kenneth Ledford  on nineteenth-  and  twentieth-century Germany, directly confronted the political action of legal professions and sought to explain why and how they mobilized (or did not) in relation to the absolutist French monarchy and liberal and fascist politics, respectively in France and Germany.

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