Revolution and the Making of the Contemporary Legal Profession by Michael Burrage
| Date | 01 September 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2007.00668_2.x |
| Author | Cyril Glasser |
| Published date | 01 September 2007 |
genre in whichto write is important. Sir John Smith and GlanvilleWilliamswere,
by some distance, the academic criminal lawyers who had most in£uence on the
arguments put and the outcomes in appellate criminal cases. Although Sir John
Smith wrote some valuable theoretical essays and Glanville Williams wrote
extensively and brilliantly outside a doctrinal framework, it was their peerless
doctrinal writing that in£uenced practice. And yet doctrinal writing, even at its
best, is intellectually a limited form.The choice is not easy.
G R Sullivan
n
Michael Burrage, Revolution and the Making of the Contemporary Legal
Profession,683 pp, hb d84.95, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006
Michael Burrage has produced a major historical and comparative work which
examines the development of the legal profession in France, England and the
United States over the last three centuries. Clearly conceived as a long intended,
end of careersurvey, he examines each of thethree groups of lawyers in their own
indigenous setting, providing a vast amount of detailed information about their
organisation, training and functions linked to a sophisticated analysis which
deconstructs the philosophical background to change on the part of the state
and the lawyers involved.
The impressive scholarship bythe author is harnessed intoa central sociological
critique which is intended to provide a thematic basis by which the similarities
and di¡erences between the three legal professions are assessed. Beginning with
a brief historyof utopianism, the search by philosophers, politicians and writers
down the ages fora form of government which eschews legal structures and coer-
cive forms, he takes as his starting pointfor a historical narrative the three revolu-
tions whichare the foundation of the modernstate in each country. Starting with
the proposition thateach involved armed revolt and the collapse and replacement
of existing legal institutions ^ The Fre nch Revolution 1789,TheAmerican Revo -
lution 1776, The Glorious English Revolution 1688 ^ he attempts to trace and
assess how farthe connection between each set of revolutionaryideals have in£u-
enced the transformation of each legalprofession into its modern form.
As a comparative exercise there are obvious di⁄culties in basing such an exer-
cise on very di¡erent historical antecedents.The French nobility were decapitated
as a prelude to the rise and fall of Napoleon. The English were the subject of a
bloodless coup which laid the foundations for the industrial revolution and par-
liamentarydemocracy. TheAmericans established a republic which shed its colo-
nial status as a forerunner to a bloody civil war. While acknowledging the
di¡erences, Burrage argues that it is still possible to compare the e¡ects of each
societal upheaval, viewed as a foundation point for the development of the legal
profession. This leads him to largely ignore the subsequent political history of
Englandand the United Statesand to suggest thatmany of the professional events
which have takenplace in the following threehundred years can be directly traced
n
School of Law,University of Birmingham.
Reviews
877
r2007 The Authors.Journal Compilation r2007 The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2007) 70(5)MLR 872^886
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