Rethinking the Role of the Legal Profession in Authoritarian Societies

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Authoritarian societies are typically marked by passivity among citizens. Although violations of rights by the state may be rampant, citizens are reluctant to challenge the state, fearing they might be targeted for persecution. Lawyers tend to be similarly cowed. This project asks whether this might be changing. Focusing on the case of Russia, the project explores how lawyers think about themselves and their role in society through a random sample of 2500 recent law graduates. Russia presents an intriguing case because the number of young people studying law exploded just as the Putin regime stepped up its curtailment of the exercise of civil rights. The survey will reveal how graduates are dispersing themselves among various types of lawyering and their attitudes towards their obligations toward clients, with particular attention to the responsibility of lawyers to support clients who want to challenge the state or other powerful actors. The results promise to provide a window into the capacity of the Russian legal profession to spur the development of civil society. The results of the survey, which will be the first to include all types of Russian lawyers, will be archived and available to other researchers for analysis. The project uses mixed methods to map the Russian legal profession and investigate its political significance. The fractured nature of this group makes a survey of practicing lawyers impossible. The Principal Investigator, working in collaboration with Russian consultants, plans a panel survey of a single cohort of law school graduates. They will construct a sample of approximately 2500 law students (recipients of both bachelors and masters degrees) on the cusp of graduation in 2016, stratified by region and institutional prestige. The PI plans to return to this same group of respondents at regular 5-year intervals (though this proposal seeks funding for the first round). Among the questions that the PI will be able to answer are: how do graduates disperse among the various subgroups of the profession; and to what extent are some demographic characteristics (i.e., gender, ethnicity, religion, class) preferenced by the different subgroups of the profession in getting a job and moving up the ladder of success. As a supplement to the survey, the PI will conduct 120 follow-up interviews with respondents culled from the surveyed population with an eye to diversity in career path as well as demographic factors. These interviews will build on the survey and will be conducted in 2017. They will be concentrated in 3 regions: Moscow, Saratov, and Tomsk. The interviews will be transcribed and analyzed by the PI using NVIVO. As with the survey, future plans call for re-interviewing this same cohort of 120 respondents at regular intervals.