2024 David B. Goodman Lecture

"Lawyers, Empires, and Social Change: Reexamining theory and theory-informed description in today’s fraught environment"

Bryant Garth
Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus
Co-director, Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession
University of California-Irvine Law School

Drawing in part on my most recent book with Yves Dezalay, Law as Reproduction and Revolution: An Interconnected History (University of California Press, 2021), and bearing in mind what has happened in the past few years, I want to challenge the pervasive and, in the U.S., mainstream legal scholarship, dominant since the 1970s and influential elsewhere, that sees lawyers charged to be agents for the rule of law and progressive social change. Scholars today vehemently criticize lawyers for falling short or facilitating democracy backsliding, and the stakes are indeed high. Much of the literature today laments the role, for example, of conservative lawyers, especially associated with the Federalist Society in the United States, in undermining progressive legal values and the rule of law; and for lawyers in many countries, including China, for similarly falling in line with authoritarian rule by law. Leading U.S. scholars, most recently in elegant articles by Scott Cummings of UCLA, are writing about how to best restore that progressive model through legal profession and legal education reforms. I would like to put this scholarship in context and offer a competing perspective, which would frustrate many of my friends among progressive lawyers, and perhaps bore some others. The basic theoretical hypothesis is that the legal profession follows power – a simple statement but with many contextual nuances. Theory-informed description would then look beyond the idealized paradigm that reigns in U.S. law schools. Contesting another blind spot in most legal professional scholarship, I also want to show why the issue of competing empires matters. My goal is to promote a more realistic understanding of the role of lawyers in progressive and authoritarian social change. My examples will in part be from the U.S. but also from other countries.