Lawyers, Empires, and Social Change: Reexamining theory and theory-informed description in today’s fraught environment
Bryant Garth
Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus
Co-director, Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession
University of California-Irvine Law School
Abstract
Drawing in part on my most recent book with Yves Dezalay, Law as Reproduction and Revolution: An Interconnected History (University of California Press, 2021), and bearing in mind what has happened in the past few years, I want to challenge the pervasive and, in the U.S., mainstream legal scholarship, dominant since the 1970s and influential elsewhere, that sees lawyers charged to be agents for the rule of law and progressive social change. Scholars today vehemently criticize lawyers for falling short or facilitating democracy backsliding, and the stakes are indeed high. Much of the literature today laments the role, for example, of conservative lawyers, especially associated with the Federalist Society in the United States, in undermining progressive legal values and the rule of law; and for lawyers in many countries, including China, for similarly falling in line with authoritarian rule by law. Leading U.S. scholars, most recently in elegant articles by Scott Cummings of UCLA, are writing about how to best restore that progressive model through legal profession and legal education reforms. I would like to put this scholarship in context and offer a competing perspective, which would frustrate many of my friends among progressive lawyers, and perhaps bore some others. The basic theoretical hypothesis is that the legal profession follows power – a simple statement but with many contextual nuances. Theory-informed description would then look beyond the idealized paradigm that reigns in U.S. law schools. Contesting another blind spot in most legal professional scholarship, I also want to show why the issue of competing empires matters. My goal is to promote a more realistic understanding of the role of lawyers in progressive and authoritarian social change. My examples will in part be from the U.S. but also from other countries.
Biography
Bryant Garth is Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at University of California-Irvine Law School, where he codirects the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession. He was Interim Executive Director of the American Bar Foundation for 2022-23, following a year as Interim Dean at UCI Law for the 2021-22 academic year. Previously, he served as Dean of Southwestern Law School from 2005 until 2012, Executive Director of the American Bar Foundation from 1990 to 2004, and Dean of the Indiana University-Bloomington School of Law from 1986 to 1990.
Garth’s scholarship focuses on the legal profession, the sociology of law, and globalization. Two of his books coauthored with Yves Dezalay, Dealing in Virtue (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Asian Legal Revivals (University of Chicago Press, 2010), were awarded the Herbert Jacob Book Prize from the Law and Society Association for the best books in the field of Law and Society published that year, He also won the LSA’s Harry Kalven Prize in 2019 for “empirical scholarship that has contributed most effectively to the advancement of research in law and society.” His most recent books are B. Garth and G. Shaffer, eds., The Globalization of Legal Education: A Critical Perspective (2022, Oxford University Press) and Y. Dezalay and B. Garth, Law as Reproduction and Revolution: An Interconnected History (2021, University of California Press).
Registration: https://cvent.me/oXLgy9
