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Class Structure and Legal Practice: Inequality and Mobility Among Toronto Lawyers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

John Hagan ,
Marie Huxter  and
Patricia Parker
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Abstract

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Can professional groups, such as lawyers, be incorporated within class analyses? Results from a Toronto survey indicate that lawyers can be usefully located within class categories operationalized in terms of power relations. The class structure of legal practice in Toronto is dominated by older, Anglo-Saxon Protestant males with degrees from Canada's elite law schools, who are practicing corporate and commercial law for predominantly corporate clients. Notwithstanding evidence of recently and substantially improved mobility prospects, we found an absence of Jewish lawyers from the capitalist class and a tendency for women to remain in a legal working class. We also discovered the emergence of a new working class in the legal profession that, perhaps unexpectedly, includes young associates in the corporate and commercial departments of large firms. The exploitation of this “professional proletariat” is as clear as are their relatively high salaries and promising prospects of sharing in the power relations that facilitate their domination and limited autonomy. We argue with qualitative data that it is the combination of high salaries, good mobility prospects, and a highly competitive environment that allows this group to be exploited with very little chance of rebellion. More generally, this kind of class analysis opens new possibilities in the comparative and historical study of lawyers and other professional groups.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , 1988 , pp. 9 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

This research was made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by fellowships provided for the senior author by the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research and Statistics Canada.

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