LAWYERS AND VAMPIRES: CULTURAL HISTORIES OF LEGAL PROFESSIONS

Vol. 13 No. 11 (November 2003)

LAWYERS AND VAMPIRES: CULTURAL HISTORIES OF LEGAL PROFESSIONS, by W. Wesley Pue and David Sugarman (Editors). Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2003. 399 pp. Cloth £50. ISBN: 1-84113-312-4.

Reviewed by Laura J. Hatcher, Taubman Center for Public Policy, Brown University. Email: Laura_Hatcher@brown.edu

Wesley Pue and David Sugarman have produced a fascinating volume of essays written from various perspectives under the rubric of “cultural histories.” The collection constitutes a cross-national survey, including work on Australia, Great Britain, the U.S., Finland, Germany, Sweden, France, and Canada. Like other recent edited compilations, most notably the volumes by Halliday and Karpik (1997) and those produced by the cause lawyer research project (see Scheingold and Sarat 1998 and 2001) that investigate various aspects in development of the legal profession, these authors have a particular theoretical axe to grind. In this case, the essayists want to understand what knowledge one can gain from cultural history that will help explain the development and structure of the legal profession.

Like other compendiums, the approaches here represent a range of disciplines – in this case, history, law, literature, gender and visual studies. And, like those other collections, LAWYERS AND VAMPIRES presents work in various national settings in an attempt to provide a comparative picture for the reader. Unlike the others, however, the Pue and Sugarman volume is less concerned with institutional relationships—i.e., the relationship between the legal profession and development of western political liberalism (Halliday and Karpik), or between lawyering and global/state transformations (Sarat and Scheingold 2001). Instead, these authors are more concerned with cultural dynamics observable in particular institutions. For this reason the book, initially, seems less interesting to political scientists than the other volumes mentioned above. However, ignoring this book would be a mistake: it presents essays with findings that can help us understand the sociolegal role of the legal profession as an institution within the various political contexts, encompassing a set of issues of great interest to those of us who study lawyers and lawyering. Perhaps even more importantly, the approaches represented here can trigger ideas concerning what we leave out in our discussions about lawyers and politics that may be well worth incorporating into our work. The book is not written for undergraduates, though some advanced undergraduates may find some of the essays useful. Faculty and graduate students, however, may find the collection quite valuable.

The intriguing title derives part of its name from Anne McGillivray’s essay in the third section, “He Would Have Made a Wonderful Solicitor: Law, Modernity and Profesisonalism in Bram Stoker’s DRACULA” (pp.225-267). This essay is an excellent example of the research presented in LAWYERS AND VAMPIRES; so rather than ddiscussing all the essays, I will briefly sketch out her argument and approach and then describe the volume as a whole. McGillivray reads DRACULA as a legal novel, though as she points out, it is not generally considered so by other authorities (citing Wigmore 1908). Weaving in discussions of the deep concerns of Victorian writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, with modernity, morality and science, McGillivray demonstrates that confusion regarding modernity and professionalism “suffuse nineteenth-century debates about the future of the legal profession” (p.235). She notes that Dracula’s knowledge and expertise are praised in the novel; yet, “if Dracula is a lawyer, he is a bloodsucker. His nobility cloaks his corruption” (p.242). McGillivray argues that the juxtaposition of Dracula’s corrupt nature with his noble image raises issues concerning who should be a lawyer and how to understand professional activity. By contextualizing the novel within the debates in England concerning the structure of the bar and the professional activities of lawyers, she exposes how changes in law and society played out in a key moment in the history of the legal profession.

I have hardly done justice to McGillivray’s chapter but did want to present a sense of the richness of the essays in this volume. They take multiple approaches – drawing on standard historical methods, as well as insights from social and political theory to produce analyses that have implications for further research. For example, for those of us interested in cultural approaches to law, the essay I described above presents us with possibilities for seeing the inscription of institutional debates within works of fiction and film of the same era. Others will find Wesley Pue’s essay, “Cultural Projects and Structural Transformation,” exploring how the structural projects of Canadian lawyers gave shape to the professional forms of contemporary Canadian lawyering, important to developing a framework within which one might think through how structures can change over time despite their seeming lack of malleability. The volume presents a set of essays that thickly describe cultural practices and moments of contingency, when meaning is re-inscribed, that promote a fuller understanding of how the complex process of meaning construction may be linked to processes of social change.

The book is divided into four thematic sections: the Formation of Lawyers; Lawyers and the Liberal State; Work and Representations; and Lawyers and Colonialism. The divisions are helpful to the reader because of the sprawling quality of the theoretical project the authors have undertaken. One problem with the book may be a difficulty common to edited volumes—a bit of unevenness among the topics covered, as well as among the various sections. Some sections have two essays, others have four. The countries under investigation vary from section to section, and sometimes it is difficult to compare the findings of one essay with those of the others within the same section. Yet, for the reader there are several options for navigating around these problems, not least of which is checking into the works cited where one will find a range of scholarship that can be used for comparison. This resource would also be quite valuable for locating potential additional readings, if the book were adopted for classroom use.

Overall, LAWYERS AND VAMPIRES is a very provocative volume, and it will appeal to many political scientists who are using multiple methods and multidisciplinary approaches in their own work.

REFERENCES:

Halliday, Terence C. and Lucian Karpik (eds.) 1997. LAWYERS AND THE RISE OF WESTERN POLITICAL LIBERALISM: EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA FROM THE EIGHTEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURIES. Oxford: Clarendon Press and New York: Oxford University Press.

Sarat, Austin and Stuart Scheingold (eds.) 1998. CAUSE LAWYERING: POLITICAL COMMITMENTS AND PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Sarat, Austin and Stuart Scheingold (eds.) 2001. CAUSE LAWYERING AND THE STATE IN A GLOBAL ERA. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Wigmore, John Henry. 1908. “A List of 100 Legal Novels,” 2 ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW 574 (cited on p. 226 of LAWYERS AND VAMPIRES).

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