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Dwindling Professional Authority: Legal Elites and the Division of Governmental Labor in Chile, 1932–70

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2020

Abstract

The prominence of lawyers in the politics of modern state building has been recognized in both historical and theoretical scholarship. In Latin America, however, legal professionals were largely displaced from public governance by the mid-twentieth century. Using Chile as a case study, I argue that, beginning in the 1930s, the rise of the administrative state diminished the authority of elite lawyers who previously enjoyed a quasi-monopoly on statecraft. In addition to the emergence of professional competitors, lawyers lost political influence for two reasons: (1) a growing divergence between political and legal careers for law graduates and (2) internal and external constraints on the bar and the judiciary that limited the ability of legal actors to influence the political process. As a result, during a period when lawyers gained political sway in much of the world, their authority in public affairs dwindled in Chile.

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Articles
Copyright
© 2020 American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

This article is a reframed account of chapters 1 and 2 of my dissertation, “The Rhetoric of Legal Crisis: Lawyers and the Politics of Juridical Expertise in Chile,” which was presented as a requirement for doctorate degree in jurisprudence and social policy at the University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful for the comments of my dissertation committee Malcolm M. Feeley (chair), David Lieberman, and Marianne Constable. I would also thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Law & Social Inquiry for their suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.

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