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From refuge to trap: formalist misadventures of Poland’s postsocialist legal profession
Title / Series / Name
International Journal of the Legal Profession
Publication Volume
26
Publication Issue
2-3
Pages
Authors
Editors
Keywords
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/13913
Abstract
Since 2015 the populist government of the Law and Justice Party in Poland has spearheaded a highly effective campaign against the country’s lawyers, encountering relatively muted social opposition. Using Bourdieuan lenses, the article traces the roots of that remarkable institutional weakness of the Polish legal profession to the highly formalist approach to law and legal thinking that Poland’s lawyers espoused. Prior to the fall of communism, and in democratic Poland, the role of lawyers in society was to act as guardians of “neatness” of the legal system – or that system’s internal clarity, cohesion, and completeness. Such a sterile approach to legal practice was initially attractive, among other reasons, because it protected the legal profession from difficult legitimacy challenges stemming from that profession’s pre-1989 coexistence with the communist regime. With time, however, the refuge that formalism offered became a trap that undermined lawyers’ political and economic power.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2019
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1080/09695958.2019.1646654