Asian Legal Revivals: Lawyers in the Shadow of Empire

"Asian Legal Revivals makes an innovative and significant contribution to the field of law and society scholarship. It is empirically ambitious, combining attention to detail in the study of individual nations with a deep understanding of the ways in which former colonial powers shaped law, lawyers, and politics in this part of the world, as well as the ways in which they were later shaped by U.S. geopolitical and economic interests. This book and its largeness of understanding and exceptional vision will establish a new benchmark and will quickly become essential reading."-Carol A.G. Jones, visiting fellow, Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong

"Well written in a clear and engaging style, Asian Legal Revivals is a timely, original, and engaging contribution to legal studies. Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth offer a rich and compelling account of the role of lawyers as both servants touand sometimes overseers ofuemerging nation-states. By telling the story of the revival of law in postcolonial Asia, the authors signal a collective awakening to the importance of the reemergence of the Asian legal fielduas an industry, as a political enterprise, and as a tool for reshaping governance. Employing a wide range of new scholarly accounts of the countries in focus and including a pathbreaking amount of interview data, this book will certainly attract attention from scholars and graduate students in sociolegal studies and political science throughout the world, and it will be read widely by legal scholars and practitioners in Asia and the United States."-Veronica L. Taylor, Australian National University and Asian Law Center, University of Washington

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 Revivals explores 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 experiencesuand 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 35o interviews, Asian Legal Revivals illuminates 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.