Asian Legal Revivals

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 Revivalsexplores 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 experiencesand 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 Revivalsilluminates 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 research director emeritus at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Bryant G. Garth is dean and professor of law at Southwestern Law School. They are the coauthors of Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order and The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States, also published by the University of Chicago Press.