It is a perspective on 'The Economy of Legal Practice as a Symbolic Market: Legal Value as the Product of Social Capital, Universal Knowledge, and State Authority', a feisty article by Yves Dezalay & Bryant Garth in 10(3) Economic Sociology (2009) 8-13 [PDF]. the article offers a point of entry to their Palace Wars book.
Dezalay & Garth comment that
Today the U.S. legal field is in a hegemonic position enabling U.S. lawyers to export prescriptions for the rule of law and to impose U.S. approaches as the best source for a renewal of the social authority of peripheral legal fields initially patterned on Europe. The basis for that hegemonic position is the complex structure of oppositions and complementarities in the United States among the various poles of legal power – scholarly, economic and political – which constitute a kind of built-in anti-cyclical device. Internal tensions and permanent competitive struggles in the U.S. legal field produce new legal opportunities and therefore renewal – as much in academic space as in the political world.In discussing views of institutional roles they argue [citations deleted] that
relentless pursuit of growth and profit called into question the professional ideal, which had long served to bolster the social credibility of the profession, of a collegial community of equals committed to serve the public interest. This context of a return to basic professional principles helped bring new approaches to the legal profession seeking to reintroduce the political dimension – whether by emphasizing the multiple forms of engagement by cause lawyers or by insisting on the primacy of the political as the basis of the professional project. The emphasis on the political was a reaction to an economic approach considered too reductionist. Even if aspiring to a political theory of law, however, the authors of the new emphasis hold to a very restrictive view of the relationship between legal professionals and the field of political power. Political liberalism, they maintain, characterizes the essence of the history and structures of the bar. They recognize that this political project faces obstacles which slow down or prevent its realization. But they maintain that this project remains inscribed in the very nature of the legal professional model – built around the defense of the freedom of civil society vis-à-vis the encroachments of state authoritarianism. This approach echoes professional ideology, but it remains too narrow, even reductionist.
History shows that legal professionals more often than not put themselves and their expertise in the service of strong rulers (condotierri, caudillos, or political bosses, for example), or military regimes, authoritarian states, colonial powers, and the like. As Kantorowicz (1997) suggests, furthermore, one can suggest that the interventions of lawyers aiming to moderate the authoritarianism of power holders represent primarily a collective strategy of legitimation – for the power holders, and also for themselves – which leads to the role of double agent characteristic of lawyers as "guardians of collective hypocrisy".
