The study of lawyers seems like a natural research topic for law and society scholars.
After all, lawyers are among the most populous and accessible actors in the legal system. Most of them are private practitioners and do not face the same institutional constraints from the state as judges or police officers do.
There is a theoretical difference, however, between studying lawyers as individual participants in legal cases and studying lawyers as one or more organized professions with distinctive social structures and cultural practices. The rise of sociolegal scholarship on the legal profession in the late twentieth century benefited much from the sociological theories of professions, which make professions rather than individual professionals the primary unit of analysis (Abbott 1988; Abel 1989). Accordingly, law and society scholars have analyzed the social structure of the bar, the legal profession's market monopoly, political mobilization, gender and racial inequalities, globalization, and many other topics.The legal profession is often assumed to be a unified, high-status, and politically influential profession in Anglo-American contexts. For many Asian countries, however, this assumption is imprecise, to say the least. Judges, prosecutors, and lawyers are separate professional groups in most civil law jurisdictions across Asia. There is also a large plurality of law practitioners in the market for legal services, historically and presently, such as barristers, vakils, pleaders, and mukhtars in British India (Schmitthener 1968), bengoshi and judicial scriveners in Japan (Ota and Rokumoto 1993), or lawyers and basic-level legal workers in China (Liu 2011), complemented by various forms
of unauthorized legal practice. Lawyers often play important roles in market transactions, yet many notable economic changes in Asia occurred without a highly developed legal profession.
The relationship between the legal profession and the state is even more complex. Strong, developmental states are prevalent in Asia, and thus many lawyers rely on their “political embeddedness” (Michelson 2007) with government agencies or officials to facilitate their work and serve their clients. However, not all lawyers are pragmatic brokers who are dependent on the state for survival. In the legal and political transformations across Asia, lawyers are often found on the frontlines fighting against arbitrary state power. That is why many studies on the legal professions in Asian cases focus on political mobilization and collective action.
Therefore, it is risky to make any general assumptions about the legal professions in Asia in terms of their social stratification, status, market positions, or political orientations. Instead, this chapter presents a variety of lawyering in different Asian contexts by focusing on three related topics: (1) the plurality of law practitioners; (2) lawyers in the market; and (3) lawyers and state transformations.