International Library of Essays in Law and Society

These two volumes collect groundbreaking socio-legal research on lawyers and the legal profession. Studies in this area exhibit enormous diversity in the questions they pursue, the methodologies they adopt, and the spheres of professional activity they investigate. They are, however, all animated by an underlying preoccupation with the problem of professional power. During the last forty years, sociolegal scholarship on the legal profession has focused on the varied sites of organized and daily professional activity to investigate how power is produced, legitimated, and deployed by lawyers, and contested by competitors, clients, state actors, and third parties. The articles and essays collected in these volumes illuminate the varied dimensions of lawyers' power.