Law as reproduction and revolution : an interconnected history / Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : legal revolutions, cosmopolitan legal elites, and interconnected histories -- Sociological Perspectives on Social Change and the Role of Learned Law: Building on and Going beyond Berman and Bourdieu -- Learned law, legal education, social capital, and states : European Geneses of these relationships and the enduring role of family capital -- US Legal hybrids, corporate law firms, the Langdellian Revolution in legal education, and the Construction of a U.S.-oriented international justice through an alliance of U.S. corporate lawyers and European professors -- Social and neoliberal revolutions in the United States -- India : Colonial Path Dependencies Revisited: An Embattled Senior Bar, the Marginalization of Legal Knowledge, and Internationalized Challenges -- Hong Kong as a paradigm case : an open market for corporate law firms and the technologies of legal education reform as Chinese hegemony grows -- South Korea and Japan : contrasting attacks through legal education reform on the traditional conservative and insular bar -- Legal education, international strategies, and rebuilding the value of legal capital in China / coauthored with Zhizhou Wang -- Conclusion : Combining social capital with learned capital: competing on different imperial paths.

"This sweeping book details the extent to which the legal revolution emanating from the US has transformed legal hierarchies of power across the globe, while also analyzing the interconnected global histories of law and social change from the Middle Ages to today. It analyzes the global proliferation of large corporate law firms - a US invention - and with them US legal education approaches geared toward those corporate law firms. This neoliberal-inspired revolution attacks complacent legal oligarchies in the name of this US-inspired modernism. Drawing on an interconnected history of the legal profession, imperial transformations, and the enduring and conservative role of cosmopolitan elites at the top of legal hierarchies, the book details six case studies - India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and China -- to explain how interconnected legal histories are stories of both revolution and reproduction. Theoretically and methodologically ambitious, it offers a wholly new approach to studying interconnected fields across time and geographies"-- Provided by publisher.