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Transformation of the Institute of advocacy and processes of legal professionalization in post-Soviet Russia
Abstract
The article analyzes from the perspective of the theory of juridical field the process of institutional professionalization of advocates in post-Soviet Russia. The author makes a conclusion that the emergence of new institutional and individual actors of the juridical field fascilitated the formation of various interests and approaches to delivery of juridical services. In spite of the formation in the early 2000s of a single organizational structure of the advocates’ community this community remains divided and stratified. In some aspects of their activities the advocates try to defend their professional autonomy. Nevertheless, in the situation of internal conflicts the Soviet-style model of interaction between the Bar and the state is actualized. Juridical professionalization of organizations defending the rights of vulnerable groups is regarded as structured by unequal access to material and symbolic resources. Special attention is devoted by the author to formation in such organizations of an alternative form of professionalization of human rights lawyers with the potential to change their juridical habitus and create a specific identity that combines elements of human rights activism and legal professionalism.
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We analyse the profession of criminal defence lawyers (“advocates”) in Russia to understand their potential for collective action in an imperfect institutional environment. In 2013, we conducted a survey of 372 advocates in 9 regions of Russia. The following two main hypotheses are tested: (1) lawyers with strong ethical values have a higher demand for collective action; and (2) the negative experience of clients' rights violations by law enforcement officers can motivate advocates to support the foundation of a strong professional association. We suggest that an advocate's profession with bona fide members at the core could be an instrument to evaluate and to improve the quality of law enforcement in Russia.
Looking back 25 years after the publication of Pierre Bourdieu's seminal article “The Force of Law,” we inquire into the background for the weak reception of his work in law and society studies. We argue that the differences in the conceptions of law, state, and society between US law and society scholarship and French historical sociology have made it hard to transfer the theory across the Atlantic. We further contend that the impact of Bourdieu's work has generally been reduced by how it has been perceived as yet another French theory. It has thus been decoupled from perhaps its greatest strength, namely, the underlying notion of sociology as a reflexive practice. Against this background, this article sets out to reconnect the practice of Bourdieusian sociology with its conceptual framework and, in so doing, demonstrate its potentially central role in the sociology of law.
Interest in studying law has grown dramatically in Russia in the post-Soviet era. We know little about how law graduates distribute themselves among the available legal specialties. This paper begins to fill that gap by analyzing the results of an original survey of 2016 Russian law graduates. The sample is divided between full-time and correspondence students. Respondents were offered ten possible career paths, as well as options for uncertainty and plans to pursue non-law-related jobs. The results show an intriguing distribution and highlight the influence of respondents’ educational choices and their attitudes towards the Russian legal system in their career choices.
This article considers the process of the juridical professionalization of the human rights organization 'The Committee against Torture', on the basis of Bourdieu's theory of the juridical field and its contemporary interpretations. It is argued that organizational models used by human rights activists reflect the configuration and the dynamics of power relations both within and outside the juridical field in today's Russia. The juridical professionalization of a human rights organization is regarded as structured by unequal access to material and symbolic resources, and dependent on continuous attempts to stigmatize its activities. The findings confirm the trend towards the formation of an alternative form of professionalization of human rights organizations which changes the common juridical habitus. It is shown that the asymmetry of the power relationships forces human rights activists to develop specific solutions for counteracting incidences of illegal violence in law enforcement organizations. The article also analyses the peculiarities of the interaction between human rights activists, victims and investigating authorities in cases of public investigation of illegal violence. Specific forms of juridical activity and tactics used by human rights activists in Russian and international courts are also discussed. However, the findings demonstrate that the current models of professional conduct within law enforcement agencies can be influenced only selectively and mostly at the local level. This is explained by the relatively small number of human rights organizations in Russia's regions, their specialized character and the difficulties of combining juridical professionalization and the mobilization of public participation. It is concluded that even modest achievements require constant and active work on the part of human rights organizations in Russia.
The paper compares institutional professionalization of advocates (licensed private-practice lawyers) and in-house lawyers during the state-socialist and the post-socialist periods in Poland and Russia. The comparative analysis uses the conceptual framework of the sociology of professions. It shows that: (1) advocates were able to preserve a certain degree of collective autonomy and self-regulation during most of the socialist period in both countries; (2) Polish advocates were better integrated at the national level than their Soviet/Russian counterparts; (3) these institutional path dependencies determined the degree of autonomy and self-regulation in the post-socialist period; (4) the discrepancy between both countries is particularly pronounced in the case of in-house lawyers who were able to establish themselves as a self-regulated profession in Poland, but never made such an attempt in Russia; and (5) there was a process of partial ‘advocatization' of legal professionals who practiced in-house during the state-socialist period. The term ‘advocatization' means a change in the form of professional practice from employment relationship to service-for-fee practice. This process could be observed in both countries, but it took very different forms due to the institutional differences described above.
Following significant changes in the legal profession since the 1980s, how do new organizational forms and actors at the edge of the law impact upon our understanding of the changing nature of the core values of mainstream legal professionalism? This methodological approach brings together a series of case studies built on original empirical research and focuses on those operating at the margins of legal professionalism in England and Wales. Also including comparative material on the US and Canada, the issues discussed are relevant for common law countries more generally and the analysis reveals the ways in which an increasingly fluid, fragmented and heterogeneous legal profession is responding to the challenges it faces in the early twenty-first century.
At the Edge of Law presents an analysis of the changing nature of contemporary legal professionalism. It employs a methodological approach and presents a series of case studies built on original empirical research. It focuses on those operating at the margins of legal professionalism in England and Wales, and also includes comparative material on the US and Canada.
Russian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) increasingly pursue domestic change by litigating before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The Russian government aims to decrease the amount of these applications and curtail the activities of these NGOs. In Russia, where legalism is often performed but sparsely delivered, NGOs engage into advocacy to supplement their international litigation. Advocating for domestic policy changes has, however, become potentially dangerous for NGOs under new curtailing legislation. Through interviews with Russian human rights practitioners, this article analyzes how two NGOs - the Anti-Discrimination Centre Memorial and the Committee against Torture - work in between their belief that law can effect into change and the necessity to supplement their litigation with other strategies. In particular, it analyzes the interactions between the state and the NGOs by examining, first, how NGOs mobilize claims before the Court as leverage in disputes, and second, how a restrictive environment affects the NGOs' litigation.
This article explores contentious politics within institutions that are neither state bodies nor “civil society” organisations in contemporary Russia. It shows that human rights activists join Public Monitoring Commissions, created by the state to oversee conditions in prisons, to prevent these bodies from “white-washing” the Federal Penitentiary Service and in some cases have effected small but noteworthy improvements inside the prisons under their jurisdiction. Their contentious claims are grounded in the government’s own legislation and made from a platform that is formally endorsed by the state and are therefore more difficult for the authorities to ignore.
Scholarship on law and social movements has focused attention primarily on the United States, and secondarily on countries that share the Anglo-American legal tradition. The politics of law and social movements in other national legal contexts remains underexamined. The analysis in this article contrasts legal mobilizations for immigrant rights in France and the United States, and explores the relations between national fields of power and legal practices. I trace the institutionalization of immigrant rights legal organizations in each country and argue that the divergent organizational forms and litigation strategies adopted by professionalized movement organizations reflect the dynamics of the nationally distinct fields of power relations within which law reform has been conducted. My analysis links the material and symbolic resources available to law reformers to the relative authority of private and public juridical actors in each state.
The history of the genesis and institutionalization of the European Convention on Human Rights offers a striking account of the innovation of a new legal subject and practice—European human rights—that went along with, but also beyond, the political and legal genesis of Europe following World War II. The rise of the European human rights institutions shows not only how law and lawyers played key roles in the early politics of European integration but also how the subtle combination of law and politics—as both national and international strategies—continued to play a decisive part in the institutionalization of European human rights. The article generally argues that the interplay between law and diplomacy had a fundamental impact on the innovation of European law and that lawyers capable of playing an intermediary role between the two were particularly central to this development.
Social movement scholars have long seemed little interested in law, and traditional legal scholars were little interested in social movement analysis by social scientists. However, recent years have seen growth of interest in the topic of law and social movements, with inquiry led by political scientists and law and society scholars. This review surveys that diverse literature, beginning with general theory regarding core concepts and then moving to a review of empirical studies organized around the multi-stage model derived from political process approaches and legal mobilization frameworks. The primary argument of the review is that law is contingent, and how it matters for social movements varies with the context and character of struggle. Most analysts agree that law generally works to support status quo conventions and hierarchical relationships, but sometimes law can be mobilized to challenge and even reconstitute the terms of institutional order.
This paper is concerned with professional identity formation, at both the individual and organizational levels, and the dialectic between individual processes and the social trajectory of organizational reproduction. The research project on which the paper is based was stimulated by the growing concern of United Kingdom legal education institutions and professional bodies with how new entrants to an increasingly diverse profession negotiate the changing demands of a complex stratified and segmented labour market. The paper will give a brief outline of the first stage of a longitudinal study of two cohorts of part-time and full-time students on the Legal Practice Course at a new university in England, (some of whom are now in training with firms) and representatives of the local legal employment market. A report of the research results to date will be set in the context of an exploration of some key theoretical perspectives which inform the field of the profession and of identity development, such as theories of symbolic, linguistic, and cultural capital.
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Transformation of the Institute of advocacy and processes of
legal professionalization in post-Soviet Russia