Asian Legal Revivals: Lawyers in the Shadow of Empire by Yves Dezalay and Bryant G Garth (review)

Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth are rightly recognized as highly innovative, imaginative, and accomplished socio-legal scholars. Their 1996 book, Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order (University of Chicago Press), for instance, drew upon extensive interviews with leading practitioners and scholars to lay bare the legal, economic, and political fault lines that mark international commercial arbitration. While not without its shortcomings, Dealing in Virtue offered unprecedented insight into those whose business it is to resolve cross-border business disputes – a worthy research undertaking in itself – while also providing a valuably textured illustration of what the all too bandied about term ‘globalization’ might actually mean in operation.

Given that contribution and given the work that they have done since that time on Latin American and East Asian ‘palace wars’– a term they use to encompass the ways in which local legal and other elites utilize foreign legal resources to advance their position in domestic contests for political, social, and economic capital¹ – it was with anticipation that scholars looked forward to Asian Legal Revivals: Lawyers in the Shadow of Empire. Once again enlisting the conceptual framework developed by the noted French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to delineate the ways participants construct a ‘field’ through which various forms of capital might be accumulated,² Dezalay and Garth, in Asian Legal Revivals, seek to portray the paths through which elite legal professionals have (or have not) become prominent players in palace wars in a broad cross-section of East and Southeast Asian settings.

There is much in Asian Legal Revivals that is highly laudable. Until fairly recently, legal professionals in Asia have received far too little academic attention – notwithstanding the fact that India, for instance, now has the world’s second largest bar in absolute numbers (with over one million practitioners) or that China’s bar, over the past three decades, has grown at a far faster clip than that of any other large nation (expanding, by some counts, one hundred fold from 1982 to the present). Asian Legal Revivals ambitiously speaks to this lacuna, exploring the colonial roots, subsequent development, and contemporary situation of the elite legal profession in Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, (South) Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. Drawing upon an unprecedented qualitative empirical foundation of ‘roughly four hundred’ interviews distributed across these jurisdictions, supplemented by a thorough examination of pertinent English-language scholarship, Asian Legal Revivals, on the one hand, shows the distinctive power of path-dependent colonial legacies while, on the other, it illustrates what the authors describe as the ubiquitous feature of double agency that marks the profession throughout the region in the sense of both being a part of and being resistant to authority and of both advancing and guarding against international interests. So it is that Asian Legal Revivals demonstrates how the relatively heavy reliance by Britain and the United States on law in the Indian and Filipino colonial projects spawned a relatively powerful legal elite in those two states even as it shows how the increasing prominence of law in at least early post–Cold War American foreign policy has facilitated the growth of an ever more consequential legal profession in the other jurisdictions being studied.

Unfortunately, Asian Legal Revivals is not without its weaknesses – at least some of which are a concomitant of its strengths. Most significantly, these concern methodology and its impact on substantive findings. The heavy reliance on participant interviews contributes importantly, to be sure, both as regards anecdotes that are telling as to broader conceptual points and with respect to the readability of what is, after all, an account of the behaviour of a set of actors, many charmingly quirky and adroit at the accumulation of social and other capital. And yet, both the individual country studies and the broader comparative argument of Asian Legal Revivals suffer from the book’s ultimately containing neither tightly woven...