The hallmark of this remarkable volume is the conceptualization of the legal complex and its relationship to political lawyering. The legal complex is “the system of relations among legally-trained occupations which mobilize on a particular issue” (p. 7). The structure of the complex may vary not only from one historical moment to the next, but even within a particular period because the legal complex may divide on an issue. The concept, then, allows comparison of situations where organized opposition to political regimes may compete with organized support of them. This powerful ability to compare both across and within cases produces a set of chapter-length studies from various parts of the globe. Taken together, they suggest how complicated the relationships are within mobilizations and countermobilizations on behalf of a wide variety of political ideas.
The problem for this volume is that the very notion of a legal complex seems to create some difficulties when deployed in research, as can be seen by comparing the case study chapters to each other. Like most edited volumes, there is some unevenness such that some chapters are more theoretically grounded than others. But, more important, there are fundamental differences in the way that contributors deploy “legal complex” in their analyses. For example, Ginsburg, in a chapter that compares Korea and Taiwan, treats the concept explicitly as an ideal type, then describes when the two cases vary from the ideal type (p. 45). He includes in his notion of the legal complex not only lawyers, but also legally trained professionals who are not necessarily members of the bar, and judges (pp. 46–7). Meanwhile, Jones, in a remarkable discussion of Hong Kong, seems to imply that the concept of a legal complex need not be tied to political liberalism to be useful as a way of framing analysis of lawyers working within a political system on behalf of political ideas.
This variation is at least partly due to the differences in types and structures of the states the scholars examine in the individual chapters. While some may see this as a flaw, I suggest here that these variations, if indeed they are a result of the empirical grounding of the chapters, make this volume all the more valuable. There is an opportunity for further work to consider those boundaries more carefully and consider how the legal complex can be deployed with concepts other than its fellow in this book, the “political lawyer.” For example, could it be used with the notion of a “cause lawyer” or “cause lawyering”? And would they be inside or outside of the legal complex? Would it ever make analytical sense to include in an analysis of the legal complex a discussion of how cause lawyers are working with the political lawyers, and at times working against them? Are there moments when political and cause lawyers become indistinguishable? If so, under what conditions does this occur? Could such a theoretical move help us gain leverage on the theoretical distinctions between cause lawyers and political lawyers?
The literatures on cause lawyers and political lawyers, of course, have been in dialogue for some time. With this volume, though, we have a possible new avenue for that discussion. Karpik argues forcefully in his conclusion that political lawyers are not the same as cause lawyers, and usually do different types of work (p. 491). In part, he says, this is because cause lawyers are not working on behalf of “core issues” in political liberalism but rather work on transient causes; and because, as they work on behalf of causes that come and go, their historical trajectory is simply shorter and less well defined (p. 491). Karpik's erudite discussion does point to an interesting possibility for both scholars of political lawyers and cause lawyers: does the history of ideas and the lawyers who advocate for them help us distinguish “political ideas” from “causes” in such a way that we can conceptualize better what cause lawyers are on a theoretical level? This is not a question that Halliday and colleagues needed to answer, though I am certain they will spend many more years thinking about what political lawyers are and how they are connected to political liberalism. However, this question is one that scholars interested in law and social change more generally may want to consider in the future, while providing a springboard for further debate concerning the types of lawyering, and their relationships to ideas, ideology, and social change.
