Continuity and Change in the Legal Profession
ABOUT
The workshop takes stock of the state-of-the-art of the legal profession in contemporary national and international society. To this purpose, the workshop brings together leading scholars to discuss pressing issues facing the legal profession, such as stratification, gendered segmentation, internationalization, digitalization, and the crisis of liberalism in many countries across the world. For decades, the legal profession has been a central actor in the development of the liberal state (Halliday and Karpik 1998) and jurists were largely educated to perform four public-oriented professional roles: civil servants (Madsen 2019), private attorneys (Madsen 2008), judges and prosecutors (Hammerslev 2003). The rise of mass education and neoliberalism in the 1980s have pushed jurists to increasingly find employment in the private sector (Dinovitzer and Garth 2004) and in international settings, such as the European Union (Vauchez 2015), international arbitration (Dezalay & Garth 1996), international human rights (Madsen 2011) and transnational commercial law (Block-Lieb & Halliday, 2017). These processes have gone hand in hand with the globalization of markets and services, which have triggered the growth of global law both in the North (Faulconbridge & Muzio 2008) and in the South (Liu & Wu 2016). The ongoing digitalization of law and society has only exacerbated these dynamics (Caserta and Madsen 2019), augmenting inequalities among lawyers (Thornton 2019) and raising questions about the potential replacement of lawyers by artificial intelligence (Remus and Levy 2017), and the eventual restructuring of law firms (Caserta 2020).
While contributing to the legal profession's increased diversification in terms of its internationalization (Henderson 2007), gender composition (Kay and Gorman 2008), and stratification (Dinovitzer and Garth 2020), these developments have contributed to the disappearance of the so called: "lawyer-statesman"; a jurist working to secure the public good (Kronman 1993). This raises important questions regarding the role of lawyers in society, especially in times of crisis of the liberal state and rule of law (Halliday and Karpik 1998), such as the present times (Graber, Levinson, and Tushnet 2018). In seeking to address this basic, yet crucial question, the workshop program covers a range of topical themes related to both the internal dynamics of the legal profession and to the external socio-political aspects influencing the trajectory and role of the legal profession in changing conditions and crisis.
List of Participants
Mex Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. Lola holds a PhD in political science (Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, 2019). Her research interests lie at the intersection of the history of European law, European public policy analysis and the sociology of intermediaries in the European Union political system. Her dissertation studies the rise, institutionalization and forms of contestations of regulatory lawyers, intermediates of the European Regulatory State.
Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Copenhagen & Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute. Salvatore is specialized in public international law, international courts and international dispute resolution, the sociology of the legal profession, as well as law and technology.
His research lies at the crossroads of law and sociology. His primary research interest is the role of the legal profession in a number of societal aspects (i.e. the judicialization of international politics, the rise of a digital society, the development of the welfare state, the protection of the rule of law). He is the P.I. of a research project (DigiProf), focused on exploring how the digitalization of the legal field is changing the structure and role of large law firms in contemporary society.
Another area of interest is the role of international institutions in developing the international rule of law and how such institutions develop and function over time.
Salvatore's research has been published by some of the main journals in the field of international law and sociology, such as the American Journal of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law, the Human Rights Law Review, the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, and the International Journal of the Legal Profession.
Salvatore is associate editor at the Italian Law Journal and part of the scientific board of the Journal de Droit Transnational.
Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics, University of California Los Angeles. Scott teaches and writes about the legal profession, legal ethics, access to justice, local government law. He is the founding faculty director of the UCLA Program on Legal Ethics and the Profession, which promotes empirical research and innovative programming on the challenges facing lawyers in the twenty-first century, and a long-time member of the UCLA David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy. In 2021, Professor Cummings was selected as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the European University Institute and a fellow at the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences to study the role of lawyers in strengthening the rule of law.
Professor Cummings’s recent research explores how innovative legal mobilization produces transformative social change. His publications include Lawyers and Movements: Legal Mobilization in Transformative Times (Oxford 2022), An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles (Oxford 2021), and Global Pro Bono: Causes, Consequences and Contestation (with Fabio de Sa e Silva and Louise Trubek) (Cambridge 2021). Professor Cummings is also co-author of Making Public Interest Lawyers in a Time of Crisis: An Evidence-Based Approach (with Catherine Albiston and Richard Abel), a National Science Foundation funded study that examines the factors causing law students to enter and persevere in public interest careers.
Professor Cummings is co-author of the first public interest law textbook, Public Interest Lawyering: A Contemporary Perspective (with Alan Chen) (Wolters Kluwer, 2012), and co-editor of a leading legal profession casebook, Legal Ethics (with Deborah Rhode, David Luban, and Nora Engstrom) (8th ed. Foundation Press, 2016). He is the author of numerous articles on lawyers and social justice, which have appeared in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals.
Professor at Lancaster University, Management School. His research focuses principally on the professions, professional service firms, and knowledge-intensive services. He has studied amongst others the accounting, advertising, architecture, executive search, and law professions. Theoretically, his work draws on perspectives from economic geography, organisation studies, and sociology, with institutional and practice perspectives from these disciplines being of particular significance in my work. In recent years, he has developed in particular three inter-related areas of research focus: globalization and professional service firms; knowledge, learning, and innovation practices, and mobility.
Postdoctoral Fellow at iCourts, the Centre of Excellence for International Courts, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. Nicholas successfully defended his double-PhD degree in Political & Social Sciences (from Université Libre de Bruxelles) and Political Economy (from Copenhagen Business School) under the GEM-STONES framework in June 2020. He holds a Master’s degree in International Business & Politics from CBS (2016).
At iCourts, Nicholas investigates the socio-legal aspects of the macro-economy of Europe and the governance of the Eurozone, particularly the role of lawyers and courts in economic and monetary policy. He also looks at the international governance of sovereign debt and the role of law and lawyers in making sense of this highly politicised and economically complex issue, especially in the current context of crisis.
Professor at Lund University, Department of Sociology of Law. Ole's research covers a number of different areas within the sociology of law using insights from sociology of elites, education, political science and science, legal history and jurisprudence. A recurrent denominator is the legal profession as an entrance to examine elites, education and development of states and markets. Moreover, his research engages with legal encounters focusing on the predispute phase, i.e. how disputes emerge and transform into legal disputes. To be able to examine such issues, my basic research interest is in socio-legal theories and methodologies.
Professor of Sociology at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), Co-chair Master and Doctoral programs in Sociology.
Liora has worked on Resistance among Lawyers and Magistrates during World War Two in France (PhD Dissertation), and then on the relationships between law and politics, on the legal training of elites, or on the use of law against discriminations in France.
Her last book, “A la gauche du droit” is dealing with the transformations of legal mobilization on the left between 1968 and 1981 in France.
Liora has been deeply involved in several research network from the Law and Society Association, on “cause lawyering”, “law and social movements” and then on “new legal realism”. She has been invited as a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society (UC Berkeley) in 2014 and 2018.
Her new research project is a study of French Supreme Courts lawyers in historical perspective.
Center Director of iCourts and Professor of Law. Mikael's research is focused on globalization and the role of legal institutions and professionals in these processes, including: 1) international Courts and their evolutions and challenges; 2) the role of legal elites in the globalization; 3) the development of the legal profession; 4) legal knowledge and power
His current research concerns the special interaction between law and global integration, the role and power of lawyers in globalization, the increased importance of supranational legal institutions and more generally, the international transformation of law and authority towards networked expertise.
Mikael has significant teaching experience from having studied and researched at a number of leading universities, including École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Oxford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Strasbourg and Sciences Po - L'Institut d'études politiques (IEP) de Paris. At the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, he directed the Centre for Studies in Legal Culture in the period 2008-11. He is currently the Director and PI of iCourts - the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre of Excellence for International Courts.
Professor of Education, Department of Education and Community Studies School of Education and Professional Development Hilary, University of Huddersfield. Professor Sanderson joined the university in 1985 after working variously in the travel business, as a residential child care worker, a contract researcher and a further education lecturer. During his time at the School he has worked on Post-Compulsory Education and Training teacher training courses, the MA in Professional Development, the BAs in Youth and Community Work, Early Years, Communications and Cultures and the EdD. From 2015-2019 he was DEan of the School.
Pete gained his BA in History from Cambridge, and a Diploma in Social Administration from York. His MPhil at York was concerned with issues of race and housing in Bradford, and he went on to work as a contract researcher on Leverhulme and EEC funded projects on race, ethnicity and educational achievement before embarking on a career in teaching. His PhD in Psychology from the University of Leeds was concerned with applying social judgement and cognitive process theories to the activity of assessing expository text, based in part on his experience as a Senior Examiner for Sociology A Level.
Chair in Law and Social Justice, School of Law, University of Leeds. Hilary's research is committed to exploring the potential for legal professions internationally to promote access to justice. Her other interests are in continuity and change in the profession, particularly in terms of the representation of women and minorities, legal aid and the profession’s work with marginal groups, and the impact of neo-liberalism and the role of the State on the profession internationally.
She joined the School of Law in January 2016 from the University of Birmingham where she was Research Director of the Centre for Professional Legal Education and Research. She graduated from New Hall, Cambridge with a degree in History, and went on to take a PhD in Political Science from York, and subsequently to qualify and practise as a solicitor. She returned to academia to teach Law and develop research in socio-legal studies at Leeds Beckett, Leicester and Birmingham Universities.
Eduardo Cornelius is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Toronto and a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar. He completed an LL.B at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, an MA in Sociology at the University of Sao Paulo, and an MA in socio-legal studies at York University.
Henriksen’s research interest involve: social networks in organisations and markets; experts and professions in governance and policy; the socio-economic and political prominence of corporate elite; inequality in a comparative perspective; and the politics of conservation and environmental sustainability. His work frequently deploys social network analytic tools to trace the origins of social and political action. Henriksen is the author of several books and he has published in journals such as Organization; Social Networks; Regulation & Governance; Global Networks; and International Political Sociology.