More than a decade ago, before globalization became a buzzword, Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth established themselves as leading analysts of how that process has shaped the legal profession. Drawing upon the insights of Pierre Bourdieu, Asian Legal Revivals explores the increasing importance of the positions of the law and lawyers in South and Southeast Asia.

            Dezalay and Garth argue that the current situation in many Asian countries can only be fully understood by looking to their differing colonial experiences—and in considering how those experiences have laid the foundation for those societies’ legal profession today. Deftly tracing the transformation of the relationship between law and state into different colonial settings, the authors show how nationalist legal elites in countries such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and South Korea came to wield political power as agents in the move toward national independence. Including fieldwork from over 350 interviews, Asian Legal Revivals illuminates the more recent past and present of these legally changing nations and explains the profession’s recent revival of influence, as spurred on by American geopolitical and legal interests.

Yves Dezalay is director of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Bryant G. Garth is dean and professor of law at Southwestern Law School. They are the authors of two previous books, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Introduction: Studying Law and Lawyers in Asia

PART I . Introduction: Geneses of Law and State in Europe and Their Relationship to Colonial Ventures Abroad

Chapter 2. European Geneses: Models of Law and State Power
Chapter 3. Expatriates and Traders in Early Colonial State Building in Asia
Chapter 4. Lawyers and the Construction of U.S. “Anti-Imperialist” Imperialism and a Foreign Policy Elite

PART II. Strategies for Constructing Legal Professions and Producing New State Elites

Chapter 5. The British Empire and the Indian Raj: A Legal Elite from Colonial Co-optation to State Independence
Chapter 6. The American Empire in the Philippines: Building a State and a Legal Elite in the U.S. Image
Chapter 7. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore: Late and Relatively Weak Colonial Legal Investment Converted into State Leadership. Korea as a Different Model of Weakness

PART III. Turf Battles of the Cold War: Lawyer-Politicians Challenged by Technocrats as Modernizers

Chapter 8. Indonesia and South Korea: Marginalizing Legal Elites and Empowering Economists
Chapter 9. The Philippines and Singapore: Lawyers and the Construction of Authoritarian Regimes
Chapter 10. India and Malaysia: Resistance of the Legal Elite to Marginalization by Authoritarian Developmental States

PART IV. Merchants of Law as Moral Entrepreneurs

Chapter 11. Lawyers as Political Champions against Authoritarianism: Relative Successes Exemplifi ed by the Philippines and India
Chapter 12. Lawyers as Political Champions against Authoritarianism: Relative Failures in Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong
Chapter 13. Corporate Compradors Doubling as Sponsors of a New Generation of Social Justice Entrepreneurs: Indonesia, Philippines, India, and South Korea
Chapter 14. Political Investment and the Construction of Legal Markets: Legal, Social, and International Capital in Asian Legal Revivals

Works Cited
Index

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