Lawyers and the Modern World

Undergraduate

Lawyers are prominent figures in the political and economic life of virtually all contemporary societies. They have played central roles in the transformation of modern states since the late eighteenth century. But why is this so? Has the place of lawyers in society been consistent across geographical and national boundaries? How does the institutional shape of the legal profession bear on the nature of lawyers’ social, political, and economic roles? Why do we have lawyers—trained legal professionals—in the first place? This seminar traces the global history of the legal profession since the Age of Revolutions. It tracks the role of lawyers in the political, economic, and social transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the emergence of new forms of professionalization and corporate existence, accompanied by regimes of exclusion and the defining of professional boundaries; the economic structure of legal work, and the functional role played by lawyers’ work in structuring market economies; and the cultural and ideological role of lawyers in fashioning “stories we tell about ourselves”—identity, ethnicity, and nationality. Although the seminar does not attempt to be geographically comprehensive, it features case studies and perspectives from across the globe, including the United States, India, Japan, Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Finland, Egypt, Australia, Palestine, Nigeria, Russia, Brazil, and China. WR , HU W 4pm-5:55pm