Rethinking the Legal Profession

This book takes stock of the evolving landscape of legal professionals in contemporary society. It provides a framework with which to understand how contextual changes—economic, technological and political—shape the professional spaces, trajectories and projects relevant to legal professionals. At the same time, it is these same contextual pressures that engender opportunities for legal activity, thereby functioning as the raw material for constituting new legal expertise and thereby the expansion of legal professional power.

It eschews conventional conceptualisations of the legal profession as comprising lawyers, judges, and jurists, and instead expands the scope of analysis to include the many new spaces in which legal professionals are positioned. To that end, it brings together leading scholars to discuss pressing issues facing the legal profession, such as stratification, gendered segmentation, internationalisation, digitalisation, and the crisis of liberalism in many countries across the world. Moreover, these contributions are empirically studied in different national settings, notably, the US, UK, France, Denmark, and Brazil.

This volume offers critical insights for scholars of law and society, sociology of professions, and legal studies, as well as practitioners seeking to understand the transformation of legal work in the 21st century. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in International Journal of the Legal Profession.