Lawyers in Society - 30 years on

In 1988, Rick Abel and Philip Lewis published the seminal three volume collection ‘Lawyers in Society’, which not only set a theoretical framework for the analysis of the legal professions, but provided detailed case-studies in separate volumes on the civil and common law world. Rick Abel, Hilary Sommerlad, Ole Hammerslev and Ulrike Schultz are editing a new three volume collection 30 years from the first publication to take account of the changes in the world’s legal professions in the intervening years. Professors Francis, Loughrey and Sommerlad (with Steven Vaughan of the University of Birmingham) are co-authoring the Country Report for England and Wales which attempts to take account of the legal profession’s response to market change and state intervention and map the principal theoretical implications of these changes and will be presenting a developing draft of the piece at a series of international conferences and network meeting, as part of the wider project, in the next two years.