Sugarman on the History of the Legal Profession

David Sugarman, Lancaster University Law School, has published "Beyond Ignorance and Complacency: Robert Stevens’ Journey Through Lawyers and the Courts," in volume 16 of International Journal of the Legal Profession (2009). Here is the abstract.

Brian Abel-Smith and Robert Stevens’ Lawyers and the Courts (LATC), published in 1967, was the first major critical social history of the English legal system from the industrial revolution to modern times (1750-1965). It has proved matchless. It is the definitive book in the field, and its core arguments remain largely unchallenged more than forty years after its publication. Challenging the dominant traditions of doctrinal legal scholarship and lawyers’ legal history by emphasising the importance of serious empirical research on current problems, it offered a less reverential alternative to the prevailing orthodoxies of the day and asked whether England’s legal services and legal education had developed in a way that best served the public interest.

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