Revolution and the Making of the Contemporary Legal Profession: England, France and the United States

Legal History

Revolution and the Making of the Contemporary Legal Profession England, France and the United States

By Michael Burrage
Oxford University Press March 2006

Specifications

ISBN-13
9780199282982
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Publication
March 2006
Format
Hardback , 696 pages
Jurisdiction
France, U.K., U.S. ? Countri(es) for reference only

Details

  • A comparative study of revolution and civil society
  • Documents and explains the major differences in the history, rules, and institutions of three major legal professions

The revolutions of France, the United States, and England each inspired dreams of creating legal institutions that did not depend on specialist intermediaries, and, in different ways, provoked attacks on the existing rules and government of the legal profession more widespread and severe than at any other time in their history. These dreams came to naught and, sooner or later, the professions recovered, but their revolutionary experiences nevertheless had a lasting impact on their subsequent organization, and help to explain why three previously convergent professions should diverge as their societies industrialised.



The social upheaval of industrialization may also help to explain many of their peculiarities down to the present day: why, for instance, French advocates imposed such strict ethical obligations on themselves, from which they were only released by the state in 1992, why American lawyers should be the first to be at ease in the market, but faced intractable problems of professional self-government, why two professions should emerge in England, both with a high degree of self-government, and both long indifferent to law schools and to the market for legal services.



Since lawyers were the first occupation to organize as a profession, this insightful comparative inquiry then asks what their experience might tell us about other organized occupations in these three societies, and the difference between their educational institutions, their division of labour, their civil societies and lesser forms of government, and about the ways they have been stratified and formed classes.

Readership: Academics and scholars in the fields of sociology, social and political theory, social and legal history, and the legal profession; as well as sociologists, political scientists and others with an interest in the development of the legal profession.

Table of Contents

1: Investigating a Fateful Encounter


Utopian Ideals and Revolutionary Practice


Two Contested and Honorific Concepts - Revolution and Profession


Why Do Professionals Behave the Way They Do?


What Have They Actually Done, or Tried To Do?


The Framework of the Investigation, the Evidence and its Presentation


2: Ideal and Myth in the Lives of French Advocates


The Formation of a State and of a Profession


Reconsidering the 'Triumph of the Professionals'


...And the 'Demise' of Advocates Before the Revolution


The Original Revolutionary Design: Act I


Terror and Thermidor: Act II


Napoleon's Selections, Innovations, and Synthesis: Act III


Return of the Advocates and Their Orders


Why was the Profession Destroyed?


Cycles of Constitutionalism, Repression, and Revolution


Bourbon Beginnings 1815 - 30


Orleanist Reprise 1830 - 48


Napoleanic Coda 1848 - 70


The Original Revolutionary Design Re-Enacted, Paris 1871


Marx's Nightmare and Tocqueville's Theatre


A Protracted and Reluctant Return to Normalcy


Schools, Stage, and Invisible Barriers


A Jurisdiction Defined by Incompatibilités and Plaidoiries


Alter Ego Tries to Change Advocates' Behaviour


Three Threats to Absolute Independence


An Anachronistic Sense of Humour


Myth and Irony in the Career of a Super-Profession


3: Practitioners vs. Legislators and Professors in the United States


A Journey from Utopia Back to England - Lawyers in the Colonies


The Revolution Controlled, for the Most Part


The Massachusetts Electorate Interprets the Revolution


Other States, Other Interpretations


Removing Restrictions on Legal Practice


The Collapse of Bar Associations and the Philadelphia Exception


Elected Judges and Codes Complete Americanization


Was it Capitalism, the Frontier or the Revolution?


Three Stages of Reconstruction


What had Changed During the Interregnum?


Practitioners vs. Professors and Legislators


Practitioners Search for an Effective Form of Government


An Undependable Ally: the Judiciary


Aother Undependable Ally: the Law Schools


Explaining Unethical and Innovative Behaviour


An Asymmetrical and Ever-Expanding Jurisdiction


How a 'Body' Became a Ladder


Failure or Success? Some Clues from Philadelphia


4: Learned Friends and Gentlemen in England - Beneficiaries of the Glorious Revolution


Confused Candidates in a Marketplace


Strange Bodies - the Inns Before the Revolution


The Trauma and the Tremor


Searching the Inns and the Courts


Explaining the Failure of the Revolutionary Movement


An Infrastructure of Absolutism is Created by Writs


...And Destroyed by 'the Greatest Thing Done by the English Nation'


The Medieval Corporation then Advances into the Modern World


Pupillages and Articles


Hedges, Honour and Markets


Little Republics, Little Commonwealths


Spinning Webs of Mutual Restraint


Status Rivals and Allies


Industrialization, Democracy, and the Unwritten Constitution


Is Professional Power an Adequate Explanation?


Thatcher and a Turbulent Tercentenary


The Discrediting of Self-Governing Communities


5: Comparing Professions and Societies


The Kinship of Old Regime Lawyers


Facing Common Revolutionary Aspirations


Diverging Paths into the Modern World


An Unmistakeable and Inconvenient Conclusion


An Ancien Régime Guide to French Modernity


A Slice of the American Dream


M'Learned Friends Illustrate Englishness


 


 



About the Author

Michael Burrage, Research Fellow in Industrial Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science

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