This dissertation examines lawyers and lawyering in post-Soviet Georgia. It suggests that the collapse of the Soviet Union triggered a rapid de-professionalization of lawyers. The monopoly of the Soviet-era Bar was broken, the number of law graduates multiplied, many of the objective conditions for lawyering (such as functioning courts) were simply absent and most jurists employed by state enterprises lost their jobs. In other words, lawyers were left with little control over their markets or work. But there has also been a growing movement towards the professionalization of lawyers since 1991. Intriguingly, the key to understanding the new professionalism lies not with the reconstruction of state-mandated monopolies (indeed for several years there was simply no law regulating the Bar), but rather with lawyers' attempts to control a market through means firmly lodged in culture and the politics of the post-Soviet transition. These means include a traditional reliance on reputation and networks. Comparisons are also made here to the legal professions in Armenia and Azerbaijan, revealing similar findings and rounding out this thesis as a regional study. The empirical findings, which are based on fieldwork carried out in Transcaucasia between 1998 and 2001, have implications for studies of the legal profession and the rule of law in transition societies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.38449 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Waters, Christopher P. M. |
| Contributors | Macdonald, Roderick (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Civil Law (Institute of Comparative Law.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001863114, proquestno: NQ78809, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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