Advocating Democracy: The Role of Lawyers in Taiwan's Political Transformation

Litigation hm not been a significant strategy in Taiwan for chauenging injustice due to the use of the Civil Law tradition as a model for the Republic of China legal system and the diminished autonomy of the ROC legal profession and legal system under martial law and authoritarian rule. Individual lawyers, however, were amang the leading proponents of reform during Taiwan's recent transition to democratic rule. Furthermore, one of the significant liberaliring refonnr ushered in by the democratic transition has been the reform of the ROC legal profession. We examine the contribution of some lawyers to democratization and consider what role the reconstituted ROC legal profession may play in the political economy of Taiwan in the future.     

Migration and Social Structure: The Spatial Mobility of Chinese Lawyers

This article uses the case of Chinese migrant lawyers to examine how the spatial mobility of individual practitioners shapes the social structure of the profession. Drawing on data from 261 interviews conducted in twelve Chinese provinces during 2004–2010, the 2009 Chinese Legal Environment Survey, lawyer yearbooks, and other public sources, the authors examine the patterns, causes, outcomes, and structural consequences of Chinese lawyers' internal migration. The empirical analysis shows that the spatial mobility of Chinese lawyers has not only increased the stratification and inequality of law practice in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, but it has also aggravated the shortage of legal service and intensified interprofessional competition in western and rural China. Based on findings from the Chinese case, the article connects the sociology of law and migration studies and moves toward a new processual theory for understanding the relationship between microlevel mobility and macrolevel stratification in the legal profession.     

Political Liberalism and Political Embeddedness: Understanding Politics in the Work of Chinese Criminal Defense Lawyers

This article examines the meanings of politics in everyday legal practice using the case of Chinese criminal defense lawyers. Based on 194 in‐depth interviews with criminal defense lawyers and other informants in 22 cities across China, we argue that lawyers’ everyday politics have two faces: on the one hand, lawyers potentially can challenge state power, protect citizen rights, and pursue proceduralism in their daily work; on the other hand, they often have to rely on political connections with state agencies to protect themselves and to solve problems in their legal practice. The double meanings of politics—namely, political liberalism and political embeddedness—explain the complex motivations and coping tactics that are frequently found in Chinese lawyers’ everyday work. Our data show that the Chinese criminal defense bar is differentiated along these two meanings of politics into five clusters of lawyers: progressive elites, pragmatic brokers, notable activists, grassroots activists, and routine practitioners. They also suggest that a principal manifestation of political lawyering is not merely short‐term mobilization or revolutionary struggle against arbitrary state power, but also an incremental everyday process that often involves sophisticated tactics to manage interests that often conflict.     

The Effects of National and Local Funding on Judicial Performance: Perceptions of Russia's Lawyers

Courts that perform well are the cornerstone of the rule of law and democratic development. When courts are perceived as legalistic, fair, impartial, and independent of the influence of extrajudicial actors, aggrieved individuals are more likely to pursue litigation over other, potentially unlawful, alternatives. Using original data from surveys of more than 1,800 randomly sampled lawyers in 12 Russian cities, we investigate the effects of perceived government funding and power diversification on a variety of indicators of perceived judicial performance. We find that, according to lawyers, financial dependence on the national government has no independent effect on judicial performance, but financial dependence on local governments has consistently significant negative effects. We also find that diversified political power has consistently significant positive effects on perceived judicial performance, probably because the diversification makes courts seem less vulnerable to unified pressure from political actors.     

关于律师法的逻辑结构与部分内容的修改语境

对现行律师法的框架结构存在的问题提出质疑 ,根据其他国家关于律师法的立法经验 ,提出在修改律师法时应遵循的逻辑结构 ,并对律师法的一些重大内容提出修改意见。     

Anatomy of a Counter-Bar Association: The Chicago Council of Lawyers

There have been few successful attempts in the history of the organized bar since 1870 to establish alternative bar groups that challenge the dominance of the large comprehensive local and state bar associations over the representation of lawyers' interests. Founded in 1969, a product of the social ferment of the 1960s, the Chicago Council of Lawyers provides an example of one such attempt. This paper examines the conditions under which a reform-oriented counter-bar association is likely to arise, the factors that permitted its successful establishment in Chicago, and the functions it serves within the legal profession as an alternative to the Chicago Bar Association.
While the violence surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago may have sparked the formation of an alternative bar association, it was intraprofessional matters that deeply concerned the founders of the Council particularly the performance of the organized bar in providing legal services to the poor and in improving the quality of the judiciary. Within the legal profession itself there was also a striking disjunction between the age of the leadership of the bar and of the numerous young lawyers who flooded in-to the bar in the 1960s. Preexisting networks of young activist lawyers greatly facilitated organizational formation.
As a reformist group with a small and relatively homogeneous membership, and lacking strong ties to powerful institutions, the Council can afford to take strong stances on controversial issues. By aggressively supporting positions at odds with those of the more established bar associations, and thus providing the media, the public, and legislators with an alternative viewpoint, the Council contributes to shattering the myth of a unified profession and to the demystification of professional authority.     

Cause Lawyers,Political Violence,and Professionalism in Conflict

This article examines how cause lawyers in conflicted and authoritarian societies balance their professional responsibilities as lawyers with their commitment to a political cause. It is drawn from extensive interviews with both lawyers and political activists in a range of societies. It focuses on the challenges for lawyers in managing relations with violent politically‐motivated clients and their movements. Using the notion of ‘legitimation work', it seeks to examine the complex, fluid, and contingent understandings of legal professionalism that is developed in such contexts, offering three overlapping ‘ideal types’ of cause lawyers in order to better understand the meaning of legal professionalism in such sites: (a) struggle lawyers (b) human rights activists and (c) a ‘pragmatic moral community'. The article concludes by re‐examining how law is imagined in the legitimation work of cause lawyers in such settings and how that work is remembered in the transition from violence.     

论我国律师政治参与的途径与价值

律师对国家政治生活的参与程度乃是一国法治实现程度的标尺之一。作为法律的掌握者，律师具有参与公共事务的良好条件。对一个国家的管理者来说，律师阶层的角色是重要并极富开拓性的，其作用的实现方式主要包括：参与立法，促进法律进步；进入国家政权机关任职；影响公正政策的制定和执行以及联系公众与政府，及时反映社会利益诉求等方面。律师是促进民主政治的重要力量，应当在我国的政治生活中发挥更加重要的作用。     

论律师的职业属性

关于律师的职业属性问题,各国《律师法》有不同的表述。我国对律师性质的立法界定,经历了从“国家的法律工作者”到“依法取得执业证书,为社会提供法律服务的执业人员”的认识过程。在《律师法》中准确界定律师的职业属性,是科学安排律师制度、合理设计律师行业发展的前提。值此《律师法》修改之际,本刊特邀请几位专家学者就律师的职业属性问题进行了一次笔谈:     

中国律师的使命——江西南芳律师事务所党建工作和剑先争优活动的调研报告

在律师行业基层党组织和党员中深入开展创先争优活动，对于巩固和拓展学习实践科学发展观活动成果，全面加强律师行业党的建设和律师队伍建设，促进律师事业健康发展，充分发挥律师工作职能，更好地服务大局、服务群众，具有十分重要的意义。为此，笔者先后深入5地市6个律师事务所开展律师行业党建和创先争优活动的专题调研。现以江西南芳律师事务所为例，将调研中形成的几点思考汇报如下。     

The Physician-Patient Relationship and a National Health Information Network

The growing use of interoperable electronic health records is likely to have significant effects on the physician-patient relationship. This relationship involves two-way trust: of the physician in patients, and of the patients in their providers. Interoperable records opens up this relationship to further view, with consequences that may both enhance and undermine trust. On the one hand, physicians may learn (from additional records) that information from their patients is — or is not — to be trusted. On the other hand, patients may learn from the increased oversight made possible by electronic records that their trust in their physicians is — or is not — warranted. Release of information through new methods of surveillance may also undermine patient trust. The article concludes that because trust is fragile, attention to transparency and confidentiality in the use of interoperable electronic records is essential.     

The Ethics of Corporate Lawyers: A Sociological Approach

The American Bar Association is considering a revision of its Code of Professional Responsibility. One revision deals specifically with lawyers whose clients are organizations; it attempts to delineate the ethical responsibilities of such lawyers when they discover an employee or a member of one of their clients is engaged in wrongdoing on the organization's behalf. Because the proposal suggests that corporate counsel may be justified in public disclosure of the wrongdoing when the organization itself fails to rectify the problem, it has sparked much controversy in the profession and much speculation as to whether and when corporate counsel will "blow the whistle." The article offers a sociological perspective on the act of a corporate counsel's public disclosure of organizational wrongdoing. The act of disclosure is treated as a social behavior, the likelihood of which is increased or decreased by a number of factors including the attorney's awareness of the wrongdoing, the attorney's orientations to the larger profession, the structure of the professional practice setting within which the counsel is located, and the supports for disclosure offered by the legal profession through its formal organizations. These factors are described and then combined into a general predictive model of disclosure by corporate counsel. A concluding discussion of the general ramifications of the proposed revisions focuses on the social implications of the attorney-client privilege, in which the client is as unique an actor as is the large organization.     

律师在构建和谐社会中的作用

良好法律的价值是公平正义。良好的法律能平等地赋予每一个社会民众自由和追求有序的权利为基础，同时对社会弱势群体赋予法律权利的方式，保证社会民众之间力量对比的基本平衡，实现权利与权力相互制约的机制，从而达到保证社会民众通过对妥协合约建立利益基本均衡的社会关系之目的。运用良好法律治理的社会可谓是法治社会。     

The Number and Earnings of Lawyers: Some Recent Findings

The number of lawyers in a society may depend on the level of real income and on the scope of government regulation. Cross-national data and time-series data suggest that the growth in the number of lawyers in the United States during the past 50 years can be better explained by increases in real income than by increases in government regulation. Other tests also suggest that regulation is of lesser importance. The combined share of memberships in American Bar Association Sections more closely allied with government regulation has not increased over time. The share of billings by the legal service industry to firms is found to be relatively stable throughout the post-World War II period, suggesting that the scope of government regulation has not caused business firms to use the legal service industry more intensively over time than individuals have. An examination of the earnings of lawyers over time suggests that members of the legal profession experienced relative prosperity during the 1920s and early 1930s and during the 1960s and early 1970s. The length of these prosperous periods is traced to the slow adjustment in the number of places in law schools.