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Formal Litigation and Professional Insecurity: Legal Entrepreneurship in South India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Robert L. Kidder
Robert L. Kidder*
Affiliation:
Temple University
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Social facts about a profession are usually treated by sociologists as dependent variables—phenomena to be explained (e.g., Carlin, 1962, 1966; Becker, et al., 1961). I propose to analyze the features of the legal profession in a society which uses such services mostly in the pursuit of litigation. While the facts about the Indian legal profession are no doubt interesting in themselves, my purpose is to examine what can be learned about the process of litigation from a study of the profession. The relationship between lawyers' careers and work styles on the one hand and the demands for law work on the other has been presented in general terms by Rueschemeyer (1973: Ch. 1). The data I shall discuss deals with this relationship in more detail, and can, I submit, yield important support for a critique of the various analyses of litigation which assume that its function is dispute settlement.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 9 , Issue 1: Litigation and Dispute Processing: Part I , Fall 1974 , pp. 11 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 The Law and Society Association

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