Legal Professions

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According to Pierre Bourdieu’s well-known definition (Bourdieu and
Wacquant, 1992: 105–6), the legal field is a national space whose char-
acteristics are determined by the hierarchies and conflicts that arise
among the actors operating within it, and from the relationships between
it and society at large. As producers, interpreters, administrators and
mediators of the law, European legal practitioners contributed to the
nineteenth-century formation of the national states by guaranteeing legal-
ity and governability in their countries (Trubek et al., 1994: 411). The
eloquence of lawyers helped construct the discourse on the nation
(Beneduce, 1996).

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Legal Professions
 Legal Fields and Elites
According to Pierre Bourdieu’s well-known definition (Bourdieu and
Wacquant, 1992: 105–6), the legal field is a national space whose char-
acteristics are determined by the hierarchies and conflicts that arise
among the actors operating within it, and from the relationships between
it and society at large. As producers, interpreters, administrators and
mediators of the law, European legal practitioners contributed to the
nineteenth-century formation of the national states by guaranteeing legal-
ity and governability in their countries (Trubek et al., 1994: 411). The
eloquence of lawyers helped construct the discourse on the nation
(Beneduce, 1996). And trials, no longer conducted behind closed doors,
became arenas in which public opinion was shaped. In their turn, the
national states transformed the legal fields during the 1800s. The great
Napoleonic legal reforms and those in Britain, the Italian codification of
1865, Germany's of 1878 and the 1864 Russian code restructured the
national legal fields and imprinted the legal professions with enduring
features.
The legal professions performed a national role such that they long domi-
nated the European political scene. This was especially the case for the Latin
countries. The French Third Republic was re-baptized ‘the Republic of
Lawyers’, which was a not inaccurate definition if one considers that in 1881
some 41 per cent of French parliamentarians were jurists. The decline of the
political lawyer began with the affaire Dreyfus, during which there arose a
new social bloc headed by intellectuals (Charle, 1994a). In 1910, French
jurists accounted for 37 per cent of all members of parliament, but by 1919
their proportion had diminished to 28.5 per cent. Yet despite this decrease,
between 1898 and 1940 legal professionals still represented 26 per cent of
French deputies (Dogan, 1967: 476). Also, Italy was a country of lawyers:
34.11 per cent of parliamentary deputies in 1880 were legal practitioners, and
in 1919, when the proportional electoral system was introduced, the share
increased to 43.31 per cent. Even during fascism, which created a new ruling
class, political representation by lawyers still stood at around 24 per cent in
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 1934. From the 1930s to 1958, lawyers accounted for 25 per cent of the
Italian parliamentary deputies (Cammarano and Piretti, 1996). In Great
Britain, from the end of the 1700s to 1832, the representation of the legal
professions in the House of Commons amounted to 14 per cent, while
between 1906 and 1960 it was fully 20 per cent (Guttsman, 1974: 28–9).
The legal professions formed the ‘backbone’of governments. During the
Third French Republic, the presence of lawyers in the executive was far
greater than in the Chamber of Deputies, and it remained high even when
the proportion in parliament diminished. In 1865, 40 per cent of British
ministers were barristers, and thereafter the proportions were in 50 per cent
in 1894, and 33 per cent in 1908 (Duman, 1983: 185). In Germany during
the Wilhelmine Empire, the legal professions formed the second largest
group within the executive after the high civil servants, and they represented
40 per cent of ministers. Their number diminished during the Weimar
Republic (31.1 per cent), and then fell sharply during Nazism (15.2 per
cent) (Knight, 1952: 41). In Italy, between 1860 and 1922 lawyers repre-
sented 44 per cent of ministers and under-secretaries; as in Germany, their
presence in the executive dwindled under fascism to around 26 per cent.
After the SecondWorldWar, the legal fields progressively lost their impor-
tance as the formative arenas of the national ruling classes. Their marginal-
ization was determined by the interweaving of various factors. First, the
process of formation of the political class changed. The advent of mass
political parties overwhelmed the old notability system and relegated jurists
to below other social groups (Cotta et al., 2000: 232, 251).At the same time,
new higher institutes and schools, such as the French ENA, supplanted the
faculties of law as the education agencies for future ruling classes. The figures
on France – the erstwhile ‘Republic of Lawyers’– are striking. In 1986, 5.2 per
cent of the deputies in theAssemblée Nationale were lawyers; in 2002 the pro-
portion rose, but only to 5.9 per cent (Le Béguec, 2003: 197, 218–19).
Italy is a variant on the European pattern, but not one sufficient to
gainsay a trend by now consolidated. In that country, the presence of the
legal professions in politics has decreased less than elsewhere: in 1994
lawyers accounted for 12 per cent of deputies and in 2001, after the intro-
duction of the majoritarian electoral system and the advent of the centre-
right governments, it rose to 15.8 per cent . Even more significant is the
permanence of lawyers in the governments of republican Italy, who
between 1946 and 1996 represented 50 per cent of all ministers and
under-secretaries (Cammarano and Piretti, 2009).
The dominance of the economic order and globalization are the other
factors responsible for the changes in legal fields. In the age of industrial-
ization, the legal sector forged enduring relations with the economic
sphere. In some countries, this interchange fostered the advent of lawyers
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 operating in the business sector and formed a professional elite whose
careers were often crowned with prestigious political offices. The English
lawyers worked in finance, in the mining industry and with the railway
companies (Sugarman, 1993: 264–79). After 1895, when the commercial
courts were created, the brightest lawyers that acted as counsel before
them rose to the apexes of the legal elites: they became high-court judges
more easily than other lawyers, they entered the House of Lords and fre-
quently became Lord Chancellors (Jacob, 1997: 94–7). In Italy, too, there
formed in the early 1900s a club of business lawyers working with the
largest banks and companies and who made important contributions to
governance of the country’s economy. Their embeddedness in the national
economy was reinforced by their membership of the boards of banks and
companies, of which they were the legal representatives while also own-
ing shares. Their activity in many cases led to election as deputies and
senators (Cantagalli, 2010).
Yet it was only when the expansion of business led to a boom in the legal-
consultancy market that legal elites endowed with characteristics different
from the past arose in the legal fields of all countries.These elites were formed
of business lawyers who had left the public sphere, severing their ties with the
community to identify with the client firm, to the point that they joined boards
of directors and participated in the firm’s profits (Kronman, 1993).According
toYves Dezalay (1992), the model of the ‘merchant of law’has disrupted the
traditional pattern of the elites operating in the legal field as composed of
‘pure jurists’, these being legal theoreticians, law professors specialized in
legal doctrine and judges who developed and applied the law independently
from the world of business.
Another effect of globalization has been the expansion of the private
sphere of justice, which economic actors today prefer to resolve their
transnational business disputes. In the past, arbitration used to be con-
ducted by members of the European legal elite, ‘grand old men’with high
professional and academic credentials, and who formed a narrow group
that helped give recognizability and legitimacy to arbitration. Opposed to
this model were the large Anglo-American law firms which forcefully
entered the European arbitration clubs and imposed their own techniques
(Dezalay and Garth, 1996: Chapters 1, 3).
Finally, the liberalization of legal activities introduced in 1993 by the
European Union has provoked far-reaching changes in legal fields and
within national legal elites. The advent in Europe of the first American law
firms, such as Baker and Kenzie (Bauman, 2002), began in the early
1960s. It first affected capitals and cities with large business volumes, like
Zurich, Frankfurt and Milan, to be followed in subsequent decades by
large-scale penetration. The competition instigated by these firms in the
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 European space accelerated unification of the legal professions and spread
a model of the law firm which changed the traditional organization of
legal work based on individual chambers. The presence of the Anglo-
American law firms in the European countries altered the assets of the
legal elites. Elites, for example in France exert much greater weight within
the national bar than their actual number would suggest, because they hire
French lawyers (Boigeol and Willemez, 2005: 59). The introduction of the
law-firm model has also changed the mechanisms whereby legal elites are
formed. In Germany, the large company law firms recruit the most out-
standing young graduates with stringent selection criteria: applicants must
possess a doctorate in law and preferably also a masters obtained in the
United States (Rogowski, 1995: 116).
The penetration of the Anglo-American legal model into Europe has
come about through mechanisms of adaptation to national contexts. For
example, in the early phase of their penetration in Italy, the Anglo-
American law firms recruited the most prestigious members of the Italian
bar. But these principi del foro found the rules of the law firms irksome
and continued to act in accordance with their traditional individualistic
mentality. Numerous partnerships were dissolved and the Italians pre-
ferred to create large, national associated firms. Today the Anglo-
American ones tend to recruit Italian lawyers trained in the English-speaking
countries, while they enter into more flexible arrangements with the
Italian legal elites so as to facilitate cooperation between the two different
cultures (Malatesta, forthcoming).
Judges
In the contemporary age, the power of the judiciary has been radically
curtailed with respect to the Ancien Régime, when judicial and political
powers coincided. During the nineteenth century, the division of the
state’s powers was followed by the shift of the constitutional axis to the
executive. On the continent, the judiciary maintained great influence and
prestige where – as in Germany – the public administration wielded great
power and occupied the apex of the social hierarchy. Great Britain repre-
sents the opposite case: in that country, the judiciary preserved its sym-
bolic power and the unconditional trust of citizens because, in the common
law system, the judge is a producer of law and not just its executor.
The British judiciary attained its independence from political power
with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. From the late 1600s onwards, this
position, which placed the judiciary above the other powers of the state,
formed Britain’s constitutional basis. And it remained such even when the
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 reforms of the late nineteenth century modified judicial organization and
procedure (Díez-Picazo, 1997: 25). The British judicial system is sepa-
rated into two branches, higher and lower. Contrary to the instability dis-
tinctive of the lower judiciary, high-court judges have since the modern
age been characterized by their irremovability, and this, combined with
their autonomy, has strengthened their power and prestige.
The model of the judiciary that arose on the continent with the French
Revolution was profoundly influenced by the necessity to shed the experi-
ence of the Ancien Régime, where the sovereign also embodied judicial
power. For this reason, judges were made subject to the supremacy of
encoded law (Van Caenegem, 1991). The judge–civil servant sprang from
the separation of powers which formed the basis of the rule of law on the
continent after the French Revolution. But despite this division of the
state’s powers, judges were not exempt from interference by the executive,
and from the risks of dangerous contamination by the political sphere.
In France, judges pursued a single career, and they might move from
investigative to the adjudicatory functions. The parquet, or the public pros-
ecutor’s office, once depended directly on the court, and the prosecutors
were appointed on fixed-term contracts. The parquet provided the easiest
access to the bench (siège), which was composed of irremovable judges.
This system bred contamination between the judiciary and the political
power, because the careers of the prosecutors depended on the Minister of
Justice (Charle, 1997). The problem was solved after the Second World
War when the new constitution of 1946 created the Conseil Supérieur de la
Magistrature, to which were attributed the powers of discipline, appoint-
ment and promotion previously exercised by the Cour de Cassation.
Also in unified Italy there arose a model of the judiciary founded on the
single career, although the bond tying it to the executive was slackened by
the introduction of a new recruitment system. Yet public prosecutors were
still susceptible to conditioning by the political power because they
depended on the Minister of Justice. Self-government of the Italian judi-
ciary came in the early 1900s. The Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura
was created in 1908; and a year later the judiciary’s first trade union was
set up, the Associazione Generale fra i Magistrati Italiani (Venturini,
1987). The judicial order also remained unchanged under fascism and
preserved its liberal structure: only the trade unions of the judges were
suppressed. Although a law reforming the judiciary was enacted in 1941,
it did not produce significant changes, except for an intensification of the
executive’s control over the public prosecutors and judges. Like Nazism
and the Pétain regime, fascism also flanked the lower judiciary with a
special tribunal for defence of the state, composed of military judges,
which tried 5619 defendants and inflicted 29 death sentences, of which 24
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 were carried out. The existence of this special jurisdiction enabled the
Italian judges to avoid direct involvement in the injustices perpetrated by
fascism on political dissidents, but it did not shelter them from connivance
with the regime (Neppi Modona, 1973: 142–55). The Italian judiciary
acquired total autonomy with the advent of the republic. The 1946 law
made public prosecutors entirely independent from the Minister of the
Justice and obliged them to begin criminal prosecutions on their own ini-
tiative. Finally, the 1948 Constitution reinforced the prerogatives of the
Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura and drastically reduced the
Minister of Justice’s powers over that body. Today, the Consiglio exercises
disciplinary power and has exclusive competence for the assignments,
transfers and promotions of judges.
In Germany, the figure of the judge–civil servant was brought into being
within the government judiciary by reforms promoted by Frederick II and
a system of recruitment based on a public examination introduced in the
eighteenth century. The separate careers system was adopted because it
was regarded as guaranteeing the independence of judges. In the period
prior to unification of Germany, the judiciary opposed the political power
on several occasions. Over the years, this critical stance changed into
defence of the strong powers that emerged during the Weimar period.After
the Nazis took power, the judges lent support to the regime, towards which
they expressed strong consensus. Hitler considered them as comrades
engaged on the ‘law front’ and the judges became executors of a people’s
justice which attributed them absolute power (Müller, 1991). Between
1942 and 1945, the German people’s courts condemned 4951 individuals
to death. If to these sentences are added those passed in the USSR, in
Poland and by the military courts, the figure reaches 30,000. Nazism acted
as a powerful factor in re-establishing a balance between the bench and the
bar. In 1933, there were 19,276 lawyers and 9,943 judges in Germany. In
1943, the judges had grown in number to 16,000 and the lawyers had
diminished to 12,000 (Reifner, 1986: 100–4). The purging of the lawyers
thus had the effect of strengthening the judiciary; but upon conclusion of
the war there was no equivalent purging of the German judges. This conti-
nuity with Nazism meant that in the German Federal Republic the judiciary
continued to act as an authoritarian body. Its rightist propensities became
evident during the 1970s when the Berufsverbot law, theoretically intended
for both extreme-left terrorists and former Nazis, was never applied to the
latter (Krause, 1996: 236).
The bureaucratic career and the irremovability of judges have been the
instruments used on the continent to protect judges against contamination
by political powers. The bureaucratic model was introduced in Prussia dur-
ing the Enlightenment, and thereafter no change was made to the principle
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 of state-controlled meritocratic selection for entry into the public adminis-
tration. The bureaucratization of the German legal professions came about
under the dominance of the bench over the bar. In 1878, the law on the legal
professions harmonized the training of judges and lawyers throughout the
country. Aspirants had first to pass a state examination at the end of their
university courses, followed by a Referendariat or internship, which at that
time lasted three years and was undertaken for two years at a law court, and
then for one year at a law firm. On conclusion of the Referendariat, the
candidate took a second state examination, and if successful received the
title of judge and could opt for the career of either a judge or a lawyer
(Ledford, 1996: 75–7). This system has remained in force in federal
Germany.
In France and Italy, the legal field has been historically characterized by
a separation between the legal professions. A French law of 1810 estab-
lished that admission to the judiciary required a degree in law, a two-year
internship as a lawyer, and a minimum age of between 25 and 30. The
judiciary was conceived by Napoleon as a body of notables fulfilling hon-
orary functions, given that their salaries were derisory. This system had
harmful effects on the impartiality of judges, who were often accused of
colluding with financial powers and of persecuting indigent defendants
(Chavaud, 1996: 41). Judges were recruited by co-option, a method which
enabled the political power to maintain control over judges and to use them
for clientelist purposes. For this reason, any attempt to introduce admission
rules based on meritocracy were fiercely resisted. In 1908, an entrance
examination was introduced, but the Minister of Justice retained the power
to nominate judges. The co-option system was abolished in the 1930s, and
during the Fourth Republic the judiciary’s autonomy was reinforced by
creation of the Centre National d’Études Judiciaires, the training school for
magistrates created in 1958 and then converted into the École Nationale de
la Magistrature in 1970.
In the pre-unification Italian states, the careers of lawyer and judge
remained fungible until the seventeenth century (Tedoldi, 1999). The two
professions were separated in the eighteenth century, but it was not until
the 1800s that the judiciary acquired its complete independence. Its pro-
fessionalization came about within the space of a century, and its referents
were both foreign models and the judicial orders of the pre-unification
states. The French model prevailed in the first decades of the new unitary
state. The bureaucratic route was still secondary and consisted of a two- or
three-year internship at a law court: instead, more than half of the judges
appointed between 1865 and 1890 (Guarnieri, 1997: 244) were co-opted
by the Minister of Justice from among lawyers, prosecutors and notaries.
In 1890, the Minister of Justice, Giuseppe Zanardelli – responsible for the
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 new penal code of unified Italy and the judicial reforms of the 1880s –
emulated Prussia by introducing a selection process based on a rigorous
entrance examination. Thereafter, the judiciary became a career entirely
separate from the bar; it was entered by young graduates in law who had
completed internships at the courts.
The British judiciary has represented the highest grade of the profession
of barrister and the reason for its great distinction. Barristers became
judges in the higher courts, where they held monopoly over defence. Such
elevation resulted, not from success in an examination, but from selection
by the Lord Chancellor among the Queen’s councillors, the high-level
barristers. This was a cursus honorum that began at the Inns of Court and
might end with appointment as a judge or even Lord Chancellor. Political
activity thus crowned the career and facilitated it at the same time. Most
of the barristers who entered the House of Commons were Queen’s
Counsellors; vice versa, judges were often selected on political criteria
from among lawyers with seats in parliament (Duman, 1983: 176–8).
Thus created was a judicial hierarchy headed by a gerontocratic caste
composed of judges. Unlike on the Continent, where the judicial career
begins at a young age, in Great Britain today the majority of judges are
appointed between the ages of 45 and 55, after at least 20 years of forensic
practice. The barrister/judge merger was for centuries the demarcation
line against solicitors. This historical division was eliminated in 1993
when the Law Society successfully applied for solicitors to have the right
of audience in high courts (Sugarman, 1995: 19).
Notaries
Of Roman origin, the notariat emerged in the MiddleAges as a legal profes-
sion and spread through Europe’s two principal jurisdictions: common law
and continental law. The combination of the profession’s two main compo-
nents, the state notary and the free professional (Olgiati, 2002: 1215–17),
produced the Latin notary and the Anglo-Saxon counterpart. The profile of
the former was defined in France by the law of 16 March 1803, which
stipulated the notary’s nature as a public functionary and incompatibility
between the notarial profession and that of lawyership. The law of 28 April
1816 equated notaries to public officials and authorized them to cede their
offices, including deeds, to other notaries. The profession of the French
notary consisted in authenticating deeds to which legal value traditionally
attached, such as matrimonial contracts, wills, donations, affidavits and,
with the advent of industrial society, deeds regarding the constitution of
joint-stock companies and partnerships, commercial transactions, and so on.
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 The model of the French notary was also adopted in Italy. The law on
notarial practice enacted in 1875 to unify the profession throughout the
country was also inspired by the French legislation, though differing from
it in some respects, one of them being the stipulation that deeds were not
the notary’s property and were to be deposited in a public archive
(Ancarani, 1983: 349ff.). The Latin notary operated in a regime of quasi
monopoly which did not exclude competition with other professions. The
Italian notaries contended for civil deeds with the municipal registrars
(Romanelli, 1988); the French ones with the avoués for judicial sales of
real estate and administration of probate.
A mixed model of the notariat instead arose in nineteenth-century
Germany. The French model was imported into the territories which had
been occupied by the Napoleonic army, while the model of the Germanic
notary persisted in the rest of the country. As a consequence, incompatibil-
ity between the professions of lawyer and notary was introduced in
Rheinland, Westphalia, Hamburg and Bavaria, while still in force in North
Germany was the dual profession of lawyer–notary that had spread at the
time of the eighteenth-century Frederickian reforms. The French and
Germanic traditions took root in the various regions and persisted after the
formation of the national state. Nazism compelled their unification by
creating the state notary and the Reich’s chamber of notaries, but even
under the totalitarian state the local notarial statutes were preserved. The
Federal Republic of Germany has resolved the matter with a pluralist
arrangement whereby the diffusion of both models is encouraged in each
Land. The Nurnotare are pure notaries and perform the usual notarial
functions. The Anwaltsnotare are instead public functionaries appointed
by the Land’s Minister of Justice. German lawyers become eligible for
appointment as Anwaltsnotare after having practised the forensic profes-
sion for ten years.
The notary occupied a subsidiary position to judges and lawyers in the
European legal field. In Italy and France, practice as a notary used to be
possible without a degree in law; it sufficed to have taken some law exam-
inations and served an internship concluding with a final examination. In
Italy, compulsory possession of a law degree was introduced in 1913 as a
result of lobbying by the notaries, who wanted their credentials to be made
equivalent to those of lawyers. The status project of the Italian notaries was
accomplished under fascism, when a 1926 law introduced a state examina-
tion with the same characteristics as that for judges: the posts distributed
across the national territory were allocated according to the classification
list (Santoro, 2006). In France, compulsory possession of a degree in law
was introduced in 1973, since when the profession’s attractiveness and
prestige have considerably increased (Halpérin, 1996: 187–8).
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 Notaries are residual figure’s in the English-speaking countries (where
they amount to a total of 1300). They do not carry out any public certifica-
tion and survive only in the jurisdictions where Roman law is still used: for
instance the ecclesiastical courts. A large part of the functions performed
by the Latin notaries, such as certification of property conveyances and
wills, passed to solicitors in 1760, when the English notaries lost control
over deeds in the City of London. Only a small group of 25 individuals, the
scriveners, continued to exercise this monopoly. But they lost it in 1999
following a complaint lodged with the European Commission in 1996 by
the notary and solicitor Mark Kober-Smith against the monopoly enjoyed
by the European notarial profession, its restrictions on access and national-
ity requirements. Kober-Smith’s grounds were that these restrictions were
contrary to the principles enshrined in the Treaty of Rome (Shaw, 2000).
In effect, given its official authority, the notarial profession had been
treated as being exempt from the norm on the free circulation of the intel-
lectual professions and their denationalization. Kober-Smith’s protest had
an immediate effect in Great Britain, although the other European coun-
tries reacted in different ways. Spain, Italy and Portugal eventually
expressed their willingness to remove the nationality requirement, but
Germany disputed the European Union’s definition of the notarial profes-
sion (Shaw, 2003c).
The Forensic Kaleidoscope
In early modern Europe, the bar was divided between two professions
distinct by function, training and rank: the attorney, who represented cli-
ents at trial and dealt with procedure; and the lawyer, who assembled the
legal material necessary for the accused’s defence. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, the forensic professions changed their institutional structure and
internal organization, assuming specific and diversified national features.
There consequently arose two tendencies: in Great Britain and France,
and partly in Belgium, the bar divided between two or more professional
figures; in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Russia and Italy, it was
substantially unified.
The modern legal profession in France began with an act of suppres-
sion. Two of the cardinal principles of the French Revolution were that the
law must be accessible to all, and that citizens must be able to plead their
own defence at trial. The democratization of defence was accompanied,
on 2 September 1790, by suppression of the corps of advocates and the
order which represented them. This act of self-destruction (advocates
made up more than one-sixth of the Constituent Assembly) has been
explained in various ways by historians, but – as Michael Burrage has
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 pointed out (2006: 104–13) – it must be framed within the broader endea-
vour to suppress the guilds and erase the old regime. To obviate the risk
that liberalization of the law might hinder the workings of justice, in
1791 the Constituent Assembly restored the function of legal representa-
tion and created the avoué (Halpérin, 1996: 43), who acted as counsel
for defence. During the Jacobin period, the avoué was replaced with
the fondé de pouvoir, who could be any citizen.According to Fitzsimmons
(1987), the deprofessionalization of the French bar during the revolution
brought the justice system to total collapse. However, more recent
studies on a local scale (Bellagamba, 2001; Fillon, 2003) have shown that
in revolutionary France the justice system continued to function because
the court-appointed defenders were selected from among advocates
and attorneys who had practised the profession during the Ancien
Régime.
The law profession in France owed its restoration to Napoleon
Bonaparte. A law of 18 March 1800 changed the judicial system of the
revolutionary period and reintroduced the figure of the attorney, to whom
it assigned legal representation before courts and defence. This reunifica-
tion was short-lived, however, for in 1804 the two functions were once
again separated. Legislation enacted in 1816 and 1822 to liberalize the bar
by freeing it from the restraints imposed on it by Napoleone Bonaparte
established distinct prerogatives for the two professions. The avoué was a
public functionary similar to a notary who could transfer his office in
exchange for a sum established by the market. The avoués worked in civil
procedure and had monopoly of defence in judicial auctions of real estate.
The avocats could act as defence counsel at all judicial levels and in all
the state’s courts without limits of territoriality; and they monopolized
defence in the courts of first instance and appeal.
But other law practitioners operated in the French system, most notably
the agrées, who were attorneys in the commercial courts, and the conseils
juridiques, law and tax advisers who set up their own associations at the
end of the 1800s. Regulated for the first time in 1971, the profession of
conseil juridique was merged with that of avocat in 1990. The French
‘kaleidoscope’ – as J.L. Halpérin has termed it (1996: 42–53) – reflected
a division of labour within the legal sector whereby avocats did not handle
business cases but left them for the other legal professions to deal with.
This pluralist model broke down in the 1960s as legal work expanded in
the economic and financial sectors. The 1971 law marked the first stage in
reunification of the legal field. The figure of the agrée working in the
commercial courts was abolished; and the avoué was no longer permitted
to represent clients in courts of first instance. Representation by avocats
was extended to all jurisdictions, except for the commercial courts, and
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 special jurisdictions where the parties could be represented by other
practitioners.
The complete reunification of the French law professions was induced
by the competitive pressure raised by large Anglo-American law firms
which opened branches in France during the 1970s. The cause of conten-
tion in this second stage were the conseils juridiques, whom the lawyers
wanted to absorb in order to counter competition by the experts-compta-
bles in the consultancy market (Boigeol and Dezalay, 1997). Although the
lawyers were successful, the second professional law of 1990 only partly
satisfied their demands. The avocats did not obtain monopoly over the law
as they had hoped, but they had to share it with other professionals – the
experts-comptables – authorized to act as legal consultants (Boigeol and
Willemez, 2005).
The law on the bar enacted in Italy in 1874 did not establish a precise
boundary between the avvocato (lawyer) and the procuratore (attorney).
The procuratore was the most important of the two figures and after 1874
formed the core of the law profession, whilst the avvocato had monopoly
of defence in the higher courts. The prosecutor’s function of representa-
tion was obligatory, whilst the attorney did not enjoy true monopoly over
defence: indeed, prosecutors who had been practising for six years could
also defend in the courts of assize. The two professions were linked by
propaedeuticity, and the 1933 professional law enacted during the fascist
period definitively established that qualification as an avvocato came after
six years of exercising the profession of procuratore, or on passing a state
examination after two years of practice (Tacchi, 2002: 474ff.).
The 1933 professional law remained in force until 1997, when the two
Italian legal professions were merged. Since then, qualification as an avvo-
cato has required completion of a two-year postgraduate internship and
success in a state examination. The unification of the two professions has
removed the territorial constraints which impeded attorneys from exercis-
ing the profession outside the appeal court at which they were enrolled.
Today, an avvocato can represent the parties at trial in all courts.
The model of the legal profession that arose in Germany during the
1800s anticipated the simplified system which, at the end of the twentieth
century, became recognized throughout Europe as most efficient. The
distinction between the Advokatur and the Prokuratur had never been
clear since the Ancien Régime. During the 1700s, the Prussian monarchs
turned their attention to the legal professions and brought them under the
state’s control. In 1780–81, Frederick II suppressed defence at trial, and
the attorney was replaced with a government functionary, the Assistentenrat
(Halpérin, 1996: 96). In 1793, the profession of lawyer was reinstated, but
it was subjected to rigid regulation by the state, which determined the
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 number of lawyers, decided where they could exercise the profession, and
placed them under the control of the judiciary.
The Prussian lawyer was a civil servant with a status inferior to that of a
judge. He was not paid a salary, and his task of legal representation and
defence of the client sat uneasily with his role as a public functionary
(Siegrist, 1990a). These contradictions were resolved after 1848, when many
states granted the requests advanced by the lawyers during the revolutionary
period.Among them was the introduction of the oral procedure in trials, after
which the lawyer could defend clients before the courts, thereby acquiring
unprecedented visibility and prestige (Padoa Schioppa, 1987).
Following Germany’s unification, the judicial system was standardized
throughout the country. The 1878 law extended the single figure of the
Rechtsanwalt nation-wide, granting him almost total monopoly over repre-
sentation and defence (except in the industrial and commercial courts, as
well as the labour tribunals introduced in 1926). In 1879, created in each
Land were three types of court – district and regional and appeal courts – to
which there corresponded three categories of lawyers. A Rechtsanwalt was
admitted to only one court and remained tied to it by a territorial restraint
which could only be avoided by acquiring ‘simultaneous admission’ – that
is, an authorization (rarely granted) to defend in all courts. The territorial
constraint operated top-downwards, in the sense that lawyers enrolled at
the higher courts could plead cases in lower ones, but not vice versa.
Such localization provoked fierce competition, which exploded in the
early 1900s, and especially at the district courts, where the largest number
of German lawyers were enrolled. From that moment onwards, gaining
simultaneous admission became the goal of the district lawyers. The latter
formed a significant component of the German bar in numerical and
political terms, and in 1907 they set up their own association. But until
1914 they failed to obtain the results that they wanted because of resistance
raised by a lawyerly elite determined to defend its protected market.
The war between the district lawyers and those of the higher courts
resumed in the first years of the Weimar Republic, when the association
of the district lawyers was opposed by that of the higher-court lawyers
created in 1921. The former were more aggressive, and after having out-
manoeuvred the other law associations, in March 1927 they managed to
obtain from the Reichstag a law which abolished the localization system
and authorized attorneys to plead cases in all courts (Ledford, 1996:
Chapter 7). On conclusion of the Second World War, each Land created
its own rules, until, in 1958, a new law was enacted which re-introduced
a single regime throughout the country. The principle of territorial limita-
tion was reprised, but only in regard to civil suits. It was abolished in 2000
owing to the intensification of Europeanization and globalization.
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 Contrary to developments on the continent, the English bar is still today
characterized by a dual structure. Barrister and solicitor are professions
which sprang from a process of rationalizing and absorbing other practi-
tioners which lasted for approximately three centuries and concluded in
the 1800s. The barristers achieved their ascent through a twofold differen-
tiation: they detached themselves from the upper layer of the profession
consisting of the serjeants-at-law, whose pupils they had been, while they
simultaneously distinguished themselves from the lower layer (Prest,
1991) formed by the attorneys. In the mid-seventeenth century, when a
burgeoning caseload forced the profession to augment its ranks, the bar-
risters took over the monopoly over defence in the courts previously held
by the serjeants-at-law; they forbade their members from providing legal
representation; and they chased the attorneys out of the Inns of Court.
The privileges won by the barristers consisted in the monopoly of
defence, absolute control over their profession, the right to complete free-
dom of speech in advocacy, entitlement to elevation as a judge and an
immunity whereby they could be arrested only in the case of homicide.
Finally, they were authorized to use the title ‘esquire’. Over a century and
a half, their monopoly of defence was subject to a constant erosion which
culminated in 1990 with the abolition of their monopoly in the higher
courts.
The history of the solicitors began with an act of exclusion. On being
forced out of the Inns of Court, the attorneys assembled at the Inns of
Chancery, where there formed a group of ‘solicitors’ – originally clerks
employed to ‘solicit’ the services of the chancery. Over time, the term
‘solicitor’ prevailed over ‘attorney’, and the two professions, previously
separate, merged during the 1800s. That ‘original trauma’ (Sugarman,
1996: 85) bred the profession of solicitor and the dualism of the British
legal profession. The solicitor maintained contacts with the client and
prepared the defence brief for the barrister. The barrister had no contacts
with the client, not even when the fee was paid: it was delivered to him by
the solicitor, who in the 1800s began to assist him in court.
The British solicitors have no counterparts in the other European coun-
tries because – as said – they also perform functions undertaken by the
continental notaries. Their principal activity was for long the certification
of property conveyances, on which in 1903 they acquired a monopoly
which lasted for around 90 years. The division between barrister and
solicitor induced both professions to make repeated attempts to erode
some privilege pertaining to the other. The barristers, for instance, sought
in 1949 to encroach on the solicitors’ monopoly of conveyancing; while
the solicitors, for their part, obtained an increasing role in defence
practice. However, with the passage of time, the distinction between
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 barrister and solicitor became blurred. Proposals for merger between the
two professions were made in the late 1800s; and in 1881 the solicitors
obtained a fast track for qualification as barrister. Merging the professions
was again proposed during the 1960s by a minority of barristers, who
regarded it as necessary to modernize the legal profession. But resistance
raised by both branches once again thwarted the project (Abel-Smith and
Stevens, 1970: 439–54).
Bar Autonomy and State Regulation
Autonomy is a fundamental stage in the construction of a modern profes-
sion. Upon its achievement, the profession can constitute its own identity,
differentiate itself from other professional groups and establish its own
representative institutions. Autonomy and self-management can never be
exercised without external agents, such as the political or economic pow-
ers, which alone are able to create the conditions in which professions can
develop and regulate their activities (Freidson, 1999: 51). All the Western
professions have need of the state and of recognition from the public pow-
ers, just as the state needs professionals and their skills to mediate its
relationship with civil society and to ensure that the public administration
works efficiently (Torstendahl, 1990).
Autonomy and state regulation are not mutually exclusive. The strong
presence of the state does not necessarily entail less autonomy for the legal
professions – as demonstrated by the French and Italian bars (Siegrist, 1989).
These are two historically determined concepts which have acquired specific
meanings according to the national context and the historical period. On
Burrage’s perspective (2006), the revolutions and political changes which
have occurred over the centuries in the European societies have likewise been
f
 actors of change in the legal professions, impacting both on their internal
organization and on their relations with the public powers.
Great Britain
The British bar has consolidated its autonomy over the centuries by virtue
of its control over training and access to the profession, and its exercise of
disciplinary powers. This process has coincided with the history of the
Inns of Court, and it has been inextricably bound up with the function of
sociability performed by the Inns, and which has been one of the factors
constitutive of the British legal profession. Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, the
Middle Temple and the Inner Temple have formed the centre of forensic
sociability and the core of the barristers’ identity.
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 The Inns of Court arose in the Middle Ages as guilds to which judges
granted the exclusive right to authorize entry into the profession. Unlike
the other professions, the British bar’s prerogatives have never been con-
firmed by a royal charter. State recognition of its autonomy and its self-
legitimation have derived from the constitutional role that the British bar
has historically shared with the judiciary. Jealous of their identity, the bar-
risters strenuously resisted all attempts, whether by Parliament or the
judiciary, to modify their structure (Abel-Smith and Stevens, 1970: 63).
During the 1800s, a fierce conflict ranged the Inns against Parliament,
internally to which had formed a current critical of their hierarchical struc-
ture, the autonomy which they enjoyed and shortcomings in the training
of barristers (Cocks, 1983: 22).
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was no institution in
England at which law could be studied in systematic fashion. In 1758 and
1800, Oxford and Cambridge had introduced legal subjects on to their
curricula, but without this being followed by the creation of a faculty of
law. Whilst on the continent the law faculties were the centres of training
for jurists, in England the Inns were considered ‘the third university’,
where the teaching of law was conducted not in an academic manner but
through its actual practice. During the 1830s, concerns were raised by
public opinion about legal training. Projects for reform were devised
which centred on three essential measures: creation of a law faculty, revi-
sion of the pupillage system and control over entry to the profession. Two
years after its foundation, the University of London tried to introduce a
systematic programme for legal training, drawing on the German model
for the purpose. A chair of jurisprudence was created in 1828 and then one
of English law in 1829. However, student intake was very disappointing:
apprentice barristers preferred to train at the Inns because this guaranteed
them entry into the profession (Brooks and Lobban, 1999).
The need to modify the legal training system and give it the theoretical
depth neglected in favour of wholly practical instruction was also felt by
groups of English and Irish barristers. In 1846 and 1854, Parliament
appointed two royal commissions to examine the state of legal education
in Ireland and England. On conclusion of their inquiries, both commis-
sions deplored the fact that future professionals were entirely bereft of
instruction in jurisprudence – unlike their continental counterparts – and
they recommended creation of a law faculty and the introduction of a
system of compulsory examinations. Several bills on the matter were put
before Parliament in the years that followed, but the Inns had no intention
of accepting a training programme common to both branches of the pro-
fession, nor of cooperating with the universities. Although they organized
some courses in law and reinforced the pupillage system, their only
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 important concession was the introduction of an entrance examination in
1879.
The conflict over legal education provided the Inns with an occasion to
raise intransigent defence of their autonomy against the powers of the
state. But it also represented a cultural confrontation between the conti-
nental and British models. Oxford and Cambridge, and subsequently the
University of London, created chairs in legal disciplines and began to
award degrees in law; but these had cultural rather than vocational pur-
poses. Until the second half of the 1900s, the Inns maintained full control
over training and access to the legal profession, doing no more than certify
some of the subjects studied at university as vocational qualifications
(Burrage, 2006: 467–8). But it was only in the 1970s that the British train-
ing system drew closer to the continental one, and the university route into
the profession began to predominate over the vocational one. There were
1500 law graduates in 1938–39; by 1980–81 the number had risen to
around 16,000 (Abel, 2003: 98). For their part, the Inns opened a school
in 1964 requiring compulsory attendance before sitting the examination
for the professional qualification.
During the 1800s, Parliament sought on several occasions to reform the
corporative organization of the Inns as well. In this regard, too, royal com-
missions were appointed and bills were presented by reformist lawyers in
Parliament intent on curtailing the power of the benchers and responsibi-
lizing barristers towards their clients by obliging them to collect fees
directly (Duman, 1983: 56–61). But the Inns were able to obstruct every
proposal for change, doing so with the support of a large part of the
political class. This explains why they were not affected by the reforms
which in those same years changed the statutes of the army, the medical
profession, the Anglican clergy and the civil service. The only changes
made were those decided by the legal profession itself. The most notable
of them was creation of the Bar Council in 1895. This was a professional
association which assembled barristers of every level, from juniors to the
attorney-general, and its purpose was to handle relations with the govern-
ment, Parliament, judges and the press on behalf of the category as a
whole. The Bar Council shared tasks and areas of influence with the Inns
and specialized in defending the interests of juniors and in consulting on
rules of professional conduct (Abel-Smith and Stevens, 1970: 219).
The solicitors used every means at their disposal to acquire a legitimacy
equal to that of the other legal professions. They started from a position of
disadvantage, however. They did not enjoy an autonomy comparable with
that of the barristers because in 1729 Parliament had placed them under
the control of the judges, and they had inferior social status. In their pur-
suit of autonomy and status, they endowed themselves with a powerful
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 association, resorted to legislation and collaborated with the government.
The solicitors acquired by legislative means what the barristers had
enjoyed for centuries by constitutional right. The point of departure was
different, but the results were the same. Yet a fundamental difference still
persists: the Inns of Courts are not comparable with the other professional
associations. Practising the profession of barrister is conditional upon
membership of an Inn, whilst membership of the other associations, and
therefore also of the Law Society, is voluntary (Millerson, 1964: 15).
The Law Society came into being in 1739 as the Society of Gentlemen
Practisers and became the most authoritative of the legal clubs which met
in the taverns and coffee houses around Chancery Lane. In the golden
period of the formation of British public opinion, these clubs fostered the
growth of a legal public sphere and then its spread from London to the
provinces. The Law Society was officially founded in 1823 and acquired
premises in Chancery Lane. Its original constitution as a private club was
modified by a royal charter of 1845 which recognized its nature as an
independent professional body with public responsibilities (Sugarman,
1996: 92). The Law Society acquired complete self-government in the
space of around one hundred years: it obtained administration of the pro-
fessional register in 1843, and subsequently control over training and
access. But it took longer to remove the judges’ power of discipline over
its members. The first conquest was the Solicitor Act of 1888, which
authorized the Law Society to investigate its own members, though not to
punish them, a power still reserved to the High Court. In 1919, the entire
disciplinary procedure was transferred to the Law Society, with right of
appeal to the courts. The 1930s saw completion of the Law Society’s con-
quest of self-government when it was empowered to draw up a code of
professional conduct. The autonomy achieved in disciplinary matters
eventually became equal to that of the barristers, and greater than that of
the other British professions, for which disciplinary power and control
over training were divided between members of the profession and exter-
nal members (Abel-Smith and Stevens, 1970: 192).
Training was a crucial juncture in the status project of the solicitors, who
did not adopt the co-option system used by the barristers, but sought to
control the entire training process and to adopt merit criteria. The Law
Society was the second professional association, after the College of
Surgeons, to set written examinations. In 1860, it introduced an entrance
examination, and in 1877 it contrived to obtain a provision that the exami-
nation boards should consist only of solicitors.
The collaborative relations that the Law Society was able to establish
with the executive further strengthened the status of the solicitors. In the
Victorian Age, the British state had a ‘minimalist’ structure and it relied on
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 the expertise of independent bodies for the formulation of policy. In this
regard, the Law Society made an important contribution to the preparation
and revision of legislation. Moreover, in 1923 it was assigned responsibility
for the provision of legal aid to the poor, and in 1949 the Labour government
ofAttlee entrusted it with administration and distribution of the public funds
allocated to legal aid schemes (Sugarman, 1995: 14–15).
The birth of the welfare state forged new bonds between the British
legal professions and the state. Over the years, legal aid became one of the
main sources of income for lawyers, and it compensated them for the
increased number of practitioners consequent upon the expansion of aca-
demic legal education. It was especially the barristers who benefited: from
the 1970s onwards. In fact, around half of their incomes derived from the
state (Abel, 2003: 240–1), and bargaining between the Bar Council and
the state on the tariffs for legal aid became decisive for their future.
Neither the growth of the state market of the legal professions, nor the
universitization of the legal profession in the post-war period, diminished
the autonomy of the legal professions; nor, for that matter, did the large-
scale modernization of British society. It was Margaret Thatcher who
disputed the relationship between the state and civil society which had
enabled the legal professions to preserve their prerogatives intact for cen-
turies. Her project to reform the legal professions represented – according
to Michael Burrage (1997: 148–54) – a challenge to British constitutional
principles.
The reform of the legal professions was part of a neo-liberal and neo-
bureaucratic project to dismantle their traditional monopolies and bring
them under the state’s control. In 1985, the solicitor’s monopoly on con-
veyancing was abolished, and the sector was opened up to competition
from an array of authorized practitioners. In the same year, in order to
reduce costs, the administration of legal aid was removed from the Law
Society and transferred to the state. A Green Paper presented to Parliament
in 1989 set out the guidelines for the Thatcherist reform of the legal pro-
fessions, which would be treated ‘like any other industry’ and adjusted to
the principles of free competition and free circulation of human capital
propounded by the European Community. Thus announced was the end of
monopoly over defence in courts, the birth of the new profession of
‘licensed advocates’ and liberalization of the activity of barristers. The
reform would be implemented under the state’s control at the cost of the
historical autonomy of the two legal professions.
The first effect of Thatcher’s policy was to set barristers against solici-
tors. The latter, having lost on the issue of conveyancing, became the
proponents of equalization between the two professions, and they chal-
lenged the bar’s monopoly of audience in the High Court and Crown
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 Courts, their purpose being to compensate for their losses and remove the
barrier excluding them from the judiciary. The two legal professions
engaged in a very public wrangle on their respective jurisdictions known
as the ‘Bar Wars’. However, many points contained in the Green Paper
were eliminated when the law was drafted, and the 1990 Courts and Legal
Service Act was a compromise which protected the interests of both pro-
fessions. The idea of ‘licensed advocates’ lapsed; for the solicitors, con-
veyancing returned to a regime of moderate competition; and for the
barristers, access to the high court was granted only to the solicitors of
proven experience.
The second, and much more important, effect was cultural in nature. On
the one hand, the 1989 Green Paper showed that the long-standing pact
between the state and the British legal professions was no longer opera-
tive, and that the latter could be subject to the state’s regulation and inter-
vention as on the continent. On the other hand, the Conservatives’policies
induced a change in the language of the legal professions, forcing them,
like the doctors, to speak in terms of market and to deprecate the effects
of Americanization (Abel, 2003: 473). This cultural change was carried
forward by New Labour, which did not cancel Thatcher’s reforms upon
assuming office but continued them with respect to legal services.
France
The history of the French bar well exemplifies the interweaving between
conditioning by the public powers and the strength of the professional
body’s tradition. It was nourished by the ‘political myth’ of its origins
(Karpik, 1995: 149). The ‘classic bar’ – as Lucien Karpik termed it – was
born in the sixteenth century, when the bar first began to differentiate itself
from the powers of the state, with which it has hitherto been confused.
Emancipated from the control of parliament, the lawyers’ ordre gradually
conquered its autonomy. The batônnier (the head of the order) was
selected from year to year on a criterion which combined eligibility,
seniority and co-option. Until 1781, he nominated the members of the
council of the order, who thereafter were elected by the general assembly
of lawyers.
Also, the acquisition of disciplinary power was a slow process. Only in
the eighteenth century did parliament (which at that time had jurisdic-
tional functions) delegate, albeit non-formally, all disciplinary power to
the ordre, which could thus suspend or expel its members. The ordre
finally formulated its code of conduct. From the early 1700s onwards, the
ordres sought to conjugate the improvement of legal culture with obser-
vance of the ethical code. Fusion between the cognitive and normative
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 universes (Karpik, 1995: 80) thus became the distinguishing feature of the
French legal profession and of its anthropology. The Revolution put an
end to this ideal equilibrium, however. The ordre was swept away by the
destruction of the corporative system and by the Jacobin determination to
found the legal system on natural law.
The reconstitution of the legal order came in 1810 with a derogation
from the Le Chapelier Law that had abolished all guilds in 1791. The
purpose was twofold: on the one hand, it disciplined a profession whose
‘factiousness’ Napoleon deemed dangerous; on the other, it was tribute
paid to the profession’s tradition which enabled the avocats to ‘re-invent’
the French bar (Leuwers, 2006: 265ff.). With the law of 1810, the state
delegated governance of the profession to the ordre, although this was a
self-governance restricted by the control exerted by the judiciary and by
the Minister of Justice. The July Monarchy marked the beginning of the
golden age of the French bar when the legal orders acquired true self-
governance. An ordinance of 27 August 1830 established that the disci-
plinary council of the order and the batônnier were to be elected by all the
lawyers enrolled at the court of appeal to which the order belonged.
Revoked during the Second Empire and reinstated in 1870, the direct elec-
tion of the governing council was again re-established by a law of 27 July
1944 which regulated all the professions after abrogation of the Vichy
legislation.
The French legal orders were given three prerogatives: administration
of the professional register, control over vocational training, and norma-
tive and disciplinary power. The order was maître de son tableau – master
of the register – in that it was empowered to decide whether to accept or
reject the enrolment of a lawyer on moral or political grounds, or because
of rules laid down by the order’s council (Halpérin, 1996: 76). With the
passage of time, the courts of appeal prevented the orders from fixing
rules of access which went beyond those established by law until a decree
of 20 June 1920 abolished their control over the register and their entitle-
ment to decide the criteria for admission (Ozanam, 1994: 53). The decree
contained other provisions designed to bring the orders under public dis-
cipline; but it was also a decisive stage in the professionalization of the
French lawyers. It protected the title of avocat by reserving it for law
graduates enrolled with the order, whereas previously it could be used by
all law graduates who had sworn the oath.
In the nineteenth century, the French orders exercised a normative
power based on local usages relative to the lawyer’s rights and duties. This
normative tradition gave rise to formulation of the codes of conduct. The
professional orders of today have lost this prerogative, as well, since its
appropriation by the state. The third prerogative enjoyed by the orders
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 used to be management of the stage, or internship, which lasted for three
years and was undertaken internally to the order. The main commitment
required of interns was attendance at the weekly sessions of the Conférence
du stage. This was a ‘workshop’ in legal forensic rhetoric where the
interns debated issues of law and performed exercises in eloquence. But
the Conférence was above all a training ground for the members of the
profession’s élite, some of whom went on to pursue political careers. Every
year, 12 trainees were selected to act as secretaries of the Conférence.
Between 1870 and 1914, fully 28 of them became government ministers
(Charle, 1994b). The order thus performed a central role in the selection
of the French ruling class.
The decline of the orders began in the 1930s, when new associations
arose in defence of the legal profession. In 1921, the Association Nationale
des Avocats (ANA) was born on the initiative of Jean Appleton, a lawyer
and professor in Lyon. The ANA (which in 1938–39 had 2340 members)
campaigned to ensure that avocats maintained monopoly over defence,
and for the stage to be given a more vocational structure. Whilst the
ANA’s first demand was not met immediately, the second was granted in
1930, when it became compulsory to spend one year of the stage in the
chambers of a lawyer or notary, or at a court.
In those years of economic crisis and unemployment, the ANA cam-
paigned for a cap to be set on the number of law practitioners, and it
became the mouthpiece for the xenophobic tendencies harboured by the
French bar during the 1930s. Also through intervention by the ANA, a law
was enacted in 1934 to protect the legal professions against the wave of
refugees from Eastern Europe. The law stipulated that a foreigner could
practise a legal profession ten years after being ‘naturalized’ (Israël, 2005:
58–62). The Vichy regime completed the work of thinning out the legal
market by introducing in 1940 retroactive rules which stipulated that enrol-
ment on the professional register required being born of a French father,
and that the access of Jews to the courts was restricted to 2 per cent of the
lawyers enrolled on the register or the stage (Halpérin, 1991: 145–52).
The reorganization of the legal profession under the Vichy regime was
not so much an authoritarian fiat imposed from above as a response to
demands long advanced by the lawyers – as in Germany and Italy. The
monopoly of the title of avocat was confirmed for law graduates enrolled
on the register or the stage and who practised the profession; exclusive
entitlement to furnish legal representation and defence was given to avo-
cats and avoués in some jurisdictions of peace; lastly, the ANA’s demand
for limits on entry to the profession was granted. Finally, the law of 26
June 1941 introduced the CAPA (Certificate of Aptitude for Exercise of
the Legal Profession), which was obtained after attendance on a year-long
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 course at a university faculty. Designed to exclude naturalized French
citizens with insufficient language skills, the CAPA is still in force today,
but has changed in substance because it is now a professional examina-
tion, rather than the university examination which it used to be.
The French bar welcomed these new dispositions and overlooked the
judiciary’s increased control over the orders. The anti-Jewish laws were
also substantially approved and applied without too many scruples by the
councils of the orders. The latter represented that section of the profession
which had developed a virulent anti-Semitism in the 1930s (Badinter,
1997: Chapter 1). In this first phase, only a tiny minority of lawyers dared
oppose the Pétain regime: this being the case of the lawyers of the Musée
de l’Homme group, who formed the first resistance network in Paris.
Things changed in 1941, when the regime increased the special jurisdic-
tions where the right to defence was almost entirely non-existent: in the
special sections created at the military courts, the lawyer had only 15
minutes to defend the accused, whilst in the martial courts there was no
defence at all. According to Liora Israël (2005), this scenario opened the
eyes of numerous lawyers, who engaged in actions that ranged from oppo-
sition to the regime, often mixed with corporative defence of professional
prerogatives to defence of the regime’s political opponents, to outright
resistance. In her opinion, one may speak of the existence of authentic
judicial Resistance during the Vichy regime.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the French legal order was
subject to rigorous regulation by the state and thus resembled the bureau-
cratic model of the Italian orders. But unlike in Italy, where the Consiglio
Nazionale Forense was created in 1944, the French orders did not have a
national body of representation and coordination until 1990, when the
Conseil National des Barreaux was founded. This was a public-interest
body which represented the bar in dealings with the government and
supervised the profession’s rules and practices, but unlike the Consiglio
Nazionale Forense it did not have disciplinary power. One wonders why
the French legal profession was so belated in endowing itself with a
national representative body. In this regard, it should be borne in mind that
the order in Paris had since the 1800s performed the role of representing
French advocacy in its entirety; and secondly that the lawyers’ trade
unions continued the ANA’s social protection of the profession after the
Second World War (Sialelli, 1987: 50), weakening the power of the orders
and abating the need for a central representative body.
Italy
The construction of the modern profession of lawyer came about in
Italy within the space of about 60 years and on the basis of a statist and
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33
 centralized model. It moved though two main legislative stages: the first
was the 1874 law on the profession of procuratore (attorney) and avvo-
cato (lawyer) enacted in the post-unification period, and the second was
the law of 1933 during the fascist regime. The 1874 law was one of the
reforms undertaken to achieve national juridical unification. The new civil
code came into effect in 1865, but it was not until nine years later that the
traditions in force in the pre-unification states were amalgamated into a
single professional law, and the resistances of some regional professional
groups were overcome (Tacchi, 2002: 89–94). But even thereafter the
Italian bar was characterized by marked regional cleavages, which were
among the costs paid for the profession’s belated and widely resisted uni-
fication. The 1874 law resulted from identification between the post-
unification political class and the bar, and not, as happened in Germany,
from interaction between the law associations and the state. Nevertheless,
it had high historical and symbolic significance. It was the first law of the
Kingdom of Italy to lay down the conditions for exercise of a free profes-
sion and for its representation, and it became the model emulated by the
other professions awaiting regulation by the state.
Practice at the Italian bar after 1874 required possession of a degree in
law, success in a theoretical–practical qualifying examination, and enrol-
ment on the professional register. However, until 1933, enrolment only
had the value of certification and could not prevent frequent abuses of the
title of avvocato. The Italian legal order differed from the French one in
important respects. It was a public corporation to which the state dele-
gated governance of the bar. For this reason, it was not maître de son
tableau, but merely verified fulfilment of the legal requirements for
enrolment on the register. It was uninvolved in vocational training and
pupillage, which functions were delegated to the universities and private
chambers; but it was entirely autonomous in exercising disciplinary
power over its members.
The legal profession’s autonomy was progressively eroded during the
20 years of fascism. The totalitarian regime increased the state’s control
over the professions by bringing them within the corporative regime.
The first law of 1926 founded the Consiglio Superiore Forense as the
Italian attorneys and lawyers had long requested, but endowed it with
only very limited self-government. The law also introduced the obliga-
tion of the oath and a clause stipulating ‘special and blameless’ conduct
as a condition for enrolment on the professional register. This clause
made it possible to block the enrolment of lawyers disagreeable to the
regime or to expel them from the profession. In 1928, the legal orders
were placed under the control of the fascist trade unions and the govern-
ment, and they were abolished in 1933. The fascist trade unions were
assigned the functions previously performed by the order’s councils,
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Professional Men, Professional Women
34
 such as maintenance of the registers and the exercise of disciplinary
power (Meniconi, 2006: Chapter 3).
However, fascism did not undertake solely repressive action in regard
to the professions, and particularly to the bar. Its behaviour exhibited the
duality inherent in the authoritarian modernization that characterized its
policies and whereby control from above and repression were interwoven
with attempts to rationalize the social and institutional system. The law of
27 November 1933 was also a response to demands for some time
advanced by the lawyers. Enrolment on the professional register became
compulsory for practice of the profession and to be able to use the title of
avvocato; professional credentials were raised with the introduction of a
more selective qualifying examination (Santoro, 1996: 127); and the
numerus clausus was introduced for attorneys to defend the law market
against the crisis of the 1930s.
The Italian lawyers only gradually aligned themselves with fascism.
Between 1919 and 1922, the period prior to Mussolini’s ascent to power,
they had scant sympathy for fascism. In those early years, the fascists
sought to ‘normalize’the bar by resorting to violent means, such as attacks
on legal chambers and the intimidation of socialist and anti-fascist law-
yers. In 1926, the law reforming the legal professions provoked vociferous
protest on the grounds that it greatly curtailed the autonomy of the law-
yers. The protests were quashed by the public authorities and failed to
prevent enactment of the law. Thereafter, space to defend professional
autonomy dwindled away (Tacchi, 2002: 439–43).
The establishment of the totalitarian state accelerated the rush among
lawyers to enrol with the Fascist Party and trade unions, albeit to a slightly
lesser extent than among the doctors and engineers. More substantial was
their presence in the executive bodies of the Fascist Party and within the
Grand Council, which confirms that the bar continued to predominate
within the fascist ruling class. Added to the positions of power held by the
legal elites were the professional benefits enjoyed by the rank-and-file
enrolled with the trade unions and the Fascist Party. Smaller and greater
rewards induced them to close their eyes against the loss of freedoms and
fundamental rights that the regime brought with it. Defence was effec-
tively abolished at the Special Tribunal for Defence of the State, where the
political opponents of the regime were tried (Tranfaglia, 1995: 535); sub-
sequently, defence counsels consisted of soldiers and officers in the fascist
militia.
Historians agree that Italian lawyers furnished fascism with strong con-
sensus, either out of conviction or self-interest. However, recent studies
have emphasized their dissenting positions and solidarism with Jewish
colleagues struck off the registers in 1938 after enactment of the racial
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35
 laws. According to Casali and Preti (2009), a total of 3771 (2.5 per cent)
‘subversive’ professionals were placed on file by the police between 1890
and 1945; and around 45 per cent of them were lawyers. The greatest
concentration of dissident lawyers under fascism has been recorded in
Sicily. The numbers change if one analyses the proportions of the various
categories of professionals which participated in the struggle for national
liberation (1943–45). Partly for demographic reasons (the partisans were
very young), professionals were involved in the resistance to only a minor
extent, and even less so were the lawyers. There were 332 medical parti-
sans, compared with 99 lawyers, in the region of Emilia-Romagna.
However, several lawyers, perhaps most notably Duccio Galimberti, died
as resistance heroes.
The transition of the Italian bar from being fascist to republican came
about through restoration of the autonomy that it had enjoyed during the
liberal period, and elimination from fascist legislation of authoritarian
provisions without altering the reforms introduced. The Lieutenancy
Decrees of 1944 abolished the corporative regime, eliminated the fascist
trade unions, and restored the professional orders. Finally, the Consiglio
Nazionale Forense was created, which today represents the bar at national
level and enjoys complete self-government: it has jurisdictional power in
disciplinary matters, and its rulings can only be challenged before the
Court of Cassation. Free trade unions were also reinstated in 1944, and, as
regards the regulated professions, a semi-official division of labour was
established whereby the trade unions defended the profession’s interests
while the orders attended to its public aspects.
However, the Italian centre-right governments of the 1950s sought to
shift monopoly on representation of the professions to the orders alone,
the purpose being to stifle the pluralism of representation, as at the time
of fascism. It was in fact only after the advent of the centre-left govern-
ments that the legal trade unions reorganized themselves on a national
scale. Founded in 1964 was the Federazione dei Sindacati degli Avvocati
d’Italia (FISAPI), which succeeded in extending the social security
entitlements of lawyers to include health insurance. It worked to con-
struct the image of the ‘new lawyer’, which during the ‘long 68’ assumed
a progressive political stance. In the following years, two factors under-
mined unitary legal trade unionism. The first was the growth of new
sectoral associations corresponding to the new specializations and pro-
fessional identities which arose within the legal field and fragmented
representation. But the most severe challenge was raised in the 1990s by
the Consiglio Nazionale Forense, which since then has acted as the
Italian bar’s main political representative (Berti Arnoaldi Veli and Berti
Arnoaldi Veli, 1997: 87–151).
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Professional Men, Professional Women
36
 Germany
In early nineteenth-century Prussia, the profession of lawyer was charac-
terized by a high degree of bureaucratization, and as such it has been clas-
sified by historians (Siegrist, 1990a: 63) as a variant of the continental
statist model. This anomaly with respect to the other European law profes-
sions had marked political overtones. Instituting a ‘free bar’ in Germany,
too, became one of the goals of German liberalism, and it had a signifi-
cance which extended well beyond the mere issue of professionalism. One
of the protagonists of this battle was legal associationism. Having arisen in
the Germany of the Vormärtz period (Ledford, 1996: Chapter 4), associa-
tions of jurists performed a leading role in the organization of the legal
profession. After 1878, in fact, representation of the German bar assumed
a binary public/private structure which was much more evident than in
France and Italy. The weight of voluntary associationism in all the German
professions was such that it is today argued that the concept of profession-
alization from above is inadequate to understand their history (Cocks and
Jarausch, 1990: 14–17).
Legal trade unionism developed during the Vormärtz period at local and
regional level; but there soon arose a project to create a national associa-
tion in preparation for German legal reunification. However, the project
was thwarted in the 1850s by the repression exercised by the various
German states (John, 1991: 170–3). Nevertheless, the legal associations
of the time made decisive contributions to the modernization of the
German legal profession. In the absence of institutions recognized by the
state, they enforced professional ethics and disseminated a culture of
self-government which induced some of the German states to create
Anwaltskammern, or orders of lawyers. The first Anwaltkammer was insti-
tuted in the Kingdom of Hanover in 1850. In Prussia, instead, Ehrenräte
(‘courts of honour’) were created: these were formed of lawyers and pub-
lic functionaries who exercised discipline over practitioners, although
their decisions could be annulled by judges.
In the 1860s, the main objective of legal unionism and the reformist
wing of the German legal profession was to achieve a ‘free bar’. This
concept denoted an open profession, regulated by the market, and free
from the control of the executive and discipline by the judiciary; but it was
also a political concept expressing the demand for change advanced by the
German reformist middle class. Its manifesto was the book Freie
Advokatur, published by the jurist and theorist of liberalism Rudolph von
Gneist in 1867. Despite the doubts and fears expressed by the rank-and-
file lawyers, above all the Prussian ones, concerning free entry to the
profession, in the end they all accepted the proposal to eliminate the
numerus clausus.
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 The law on the legal profession, the Rechtsanwaltsordnung (RAO),
enacted eight years after German unification, was a compromise between
more advanced liberal tendencies and resistance within the government
and among lawyers. The principle of free entry to the profession recog-
nized by the law was the consequence of harmonization between the train-
ing programmes for judges and Rechtsanwälte. On passing the second
state examination, the Referendar could choose between becoming a
judge or applying for admission to the bar. The self-government of the
legal profession was also recognized. Created in all the courts of appeal
were Anwaltskammern, public bodies similar to the Italian orders and
which had compulsory enrolment; they enjoyed wide margins of discre-
tion on the admission of candidates, but they had less autonomy than the
French and Italian orders because they shared disciplinary power with
judges. The Anwaltskammern flanked the voluntary bar associations. The
Deutsche Anwaltverein (DAV), which arose in 1871 from merger between
the Prussian and Bavarian bar associations, became the powerful represen-
tative of the interests of German lawyers, three-quarters of whom were
members of the DAV on the eve of the First World War (McClelland,
1991: 158).
During the Wilhelmine Empire, public and private representation of the
legal profession were balanced in that both were governed by the profes-
sional elite formed of the attorneys who practised as counsel in the higher
courts. However, the balance was disrupted during the Weimar Republic.
Under the impact of the economic crisis, the principles of the 1878 law
were contested, and with them the binary Anwaltskammern/DAV system of
representation. The first blow was struck by a law of 1927 on simultaneous
admission, as discussed above. This marked the failure of the unitary
model of representation personified in the DAV, which was unable to medi-
ate among the conflicting interests of the various categories of lawyers.
Demand for re-introduction of the numerus clausus was the second
blow inflicted on the liberal bar. Expanding enrolments at law faculties at
the end of the 1800s had first provoked discontent among lawyers, but the
problem exploded in the 1920s, when the rise in university enrolments
occurred in a context of profound crisis of the middle classes. In keeping
with a well-known pattern of behaviour, the elite of the profession had no
qualms about a free market because it possessed the resources to deal with
it (Ledford, 1996: 271–2); it was instead the lower classes which feared
liberalization and demanded protective measures. As the economic situa-
tion deteriorated, even a liberal association like the DAV was forced to
reverse its policy, and between 1931 and 1932 it joined the Anwaltskammern
in lobbying the government for temporary closure of entry to the profes-
sion. Overwhelmed by the demands of all the professions, the Weimar
government decided to restrict enrolments at university.
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Professional Men, Professional Women
38
 On achieving power, Nazism adopted a strategy already invoked by
lawyers during the last years of the Weimar Republic: thinning the ranks
of the profession by eliminating its weakest members. Added to this was
racial selection: a law of 25 April 1933 established that university matric-
ulations by Jewish students must not exceed 5 per cent of enrolments at
all faculties, and female matriculations should be no more than 10 per cent
of male ones, while mediocre students were discouraged from continuing
their studies and deprived of financial support. Between 1933 and the
1935, other provisions excluded Jewish lawyers, those suspected of com-
munism, and women, from exercise of the profession. In 1935, some 4394
lawyers, equal to one-quarter of the profession, were expelled from it; the
1753 Jewish lawyers who still remained in 1937 were expelled in
November 1938 (Reifner, 1986: 119).
Nazism favoured the traditional components of the legal profession
over its new practitioners, and it completed – as did fascism – the lawyers’
professionalization within a hierarchical and authoritarian context. The
lawyers obtained professional monopoly, and judges, retired functionaries
and legal advisers were excluded from advocacy before the courts. The
lawyers were also authorized to practise in the labour courts, from which
they had been excluded during the Weimar Republic. Moreover, the new
category of company lawyers was prohibited from representing clients in
civil cases and in arbitration. Finally, in 1935, Nazism distinguished legal
internships from those undertaken by judges, thus satisfying a demand
forcefully expressed by the lawyers. The bar was brought under the control of
the public administration and the judges; the Anwaltskammern were purged,
deprived of legal personality and self-government, and subjected to the
control of the Lawyer Imperial Chamber (Reichsrechtsanwaltskammer).
The latter was the higher representative body for which the German law-
yers had unsuccessfully campaigned since the early 1900s, and which
Nazism founded, attributing it control over all lawyers. Created in 1928
was the Bund Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Juristen (BSNDJ), the
league of Nazi jurists which contributed to the nazification of lawyers
after 1933. The Bund absorbed the DAV and the other legal associations,
and because it selected the members of the executive bodies of the
Anwaltskammern and the Imperial Chamber, it gained control over the
entire representation of the legal profession.
Elliott Freidson (2002) has explained the ways in which the totalitarian
states provoked processes of deprofessionalization which consisted in the
retreat of the professions from their fundamental functions. The case of the
legal profession under fascism, Nazism and the Vichy regime is a complex
variant on this model. On the one hand, these regimes fuelled the profes-
sionalization of the bar; on the other, they triggered a deprofessionalizing
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 process which involved the collaboration of lawyers with the totalitarian
regime. In the case of the German lawyers, deprofessionalization was
manifest in total subordination to the judge-Führer, before whom they even
requested the death penalty for their clients, instead of acquittal or com-
mutation of the sentence.
The nazification of the German lawyers bore many similarities with the
process in Italy. Also in Germany, few lawyers belonged to the Nazi
movement before 1933. It was only when Hitler took power that the mem-
bership of the Bund National Sozialistischer Deutscher Juristen rose from
1500 to 80,000. However, Jarausch (1990: 101) maintains that in its early
years the regime did not command consensus among lawyers, whose nazi-
fication was less widespread than it was among judges. Moreover, the
numerous court cases allocated to Jewish lawyers before 1933 show –
according to Reifner (1986: 115) – that anti-Semitism was not generalized
in the German courts. This explains why the DAV sought to protect its
non-Aryan members before it was dissolved. According to Charles
McClelland (1991: 223), the nazification of the German bar proceeded
slowly. There was no lack of resistance raised in defence of professional
prerogatives, such as that by the lawyer Harry Litten. Finally, some jurists
also participated in the resistance, for which they paid with their lives
(Hoffmann, 1994: 87–90).
After the birth of the German Federal Republic, the system of representa-
tion consisting of the Anwaltskammern and the DAV was restored
(Rueschemeyer, 1973: 20), and the Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer (German
Federal Bar) was added to it in 1959. Formed by the presidents of the
Anwaltskammern, the Bundsrechtsanswaltkammer compiles the profes-
sional code of conduct, but unlike the Italian Consiglio Nazionale Forense
it has neither disciplinary nor jurisdictional powers. The new federal system
has increased the self-government of the bar because disciplinary power has
been restored to the courts of honour composed of three lawyers.
Nevertheless – as Halpérin points out (1996: 106) – the exercise of disci-
pline by lawyers decreases as the hierarchy of disciplinary organs expands,
given that the presence of judges increases in the higher levels of the justice
system.
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