Women Lawyers for Social Causes: Professional Careers and Legal Development in Thailand

Women lawyers are increasing seen among the leading legal defenders of human rights and social movements in Thailand. Increasing visibility is partly a result of news coverage and social media, but women lawyers activism has far older roots. In this article, we examine two related processes of change that contribute to women’s emergence as leading social cause practitioners. First, we discuss the relationship between Thailand’s legal system and its social and political development since the end of the nineteenth century. Second, we employ career narratives of three women lawyers with innovative practices for social causes as a lens through which to examine how lawyers transform available resources into an identity, law practice, and law. We discuss not only the role of prior generations of women lawyers, connections between influential elites and social cause lawyers, and the founding of a few key organizations within the NGO community, but also the role of the women as architects of their own careers. We conclude that they have become successful by aligning their practices with emerging social movements and progressive bureaucrats, unexpectedly creating professional identities with somewhat different relationships to the rule of law.

Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain

'Precarious Professionals' uncovers the inequalities and insecurities which lay at the heart of professional life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. The book challenges conventional categories in the history of work, exploring instead the everyday labour of maintaining a professional identity on the margins of the traditional professions. Situating new historical perspectives on gender at the forefront of their research, the contributors explore how professional cultures could not only define themselves against, but often flourished outside of, the confines of patriarchal codes and structures. Putting the lives of precarious professionals in dialogue with master narratives in modern British history, the chapters in this volume re-evaluate the relationship between professional identity and social change. The collection offers twelve fascinating studies of women and men who held positions in art and science, high culture and popular journalism, private enterprise and public service between the 1840s and the 1960s. From pioneering women lawyers and scientists to ballet dancers, secretaries, historians, humanitarian relief workers, social researchers, and Cold War diplomats, the book reveals that precarity was a thread woven throughout the very fabric of modern professional life, with far-reaching implications for the study of power, privilege, and expertise. Together, these essays enrich our understanding of the histories and mysteries of professional identity and help us to reimagine the future of work in precarious times.

The mindful lawyer: Investigating the effects of two online mindfulness programs on self-reported well-being in the legal profession

a.Objectives: Two studies were conducted to determine whether mindfulness meditation could be an effective tool for improving the well-being of lawyers—a population plagued by high rates of depression, anxiety, and stress.b.Methods: Study 1. Participants recruited from the National Association of Women Lawyers completed questionnaires before and after engaging in an 8-week mindfulness program. Study 2. Lawyers from an American law firm were randomly assigned to either an experimental or waitlist control condition. Well-being was measured at the beginning of the study and after experimental participants had completed a 30-day intervention. c.Results: Study 1. Participants reported significant improvements in mood, resilience, trait mindfulness, stress, anxiety, and depression over time. Study 2. Post-intervention, experimental participants reported better mood, lower levels of stress, and higher levels of non-reactivity and observing than waitlist control participants.d.Conclusions: Legal professionals may benefit from the practices of mindfulness and meditation.

The Accidental Emergence of India’s Elite Women Lawyers

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the emergence of India's elite women lawyers. Despite being agnostic to the cause of feminism, and using the governance language of meritocracy and modernity, many elite law firms in India have managed to produce the kinds of environments that more agentic organizations with committed interests in diversity have failed to produce in other sites. Not only are women well represented at entry and more senior levels in these law firms, they also experience their environments rather differently from their peers in similar kinds of organizations globally and locally. In doing so, these firms have not only managed to create historically unimaginable spaces of possibility for women, they have also managed to set path dependencies for organizations to have more (possible intentionally) feminist futures. These can be considered as accidentally feminist organizations. The chapter explains that the book reveals a set of structural conditions that fortuitously have come together to create environments of emancipation for these women lawyers: including organizational novelty and the imagined forces of globalization, a particularly receptive interactional audience, and the specific contingencies of a particular cultural moment in India's neoliberal history.

Facings

This chapter discusses the ways in which relationships between female professionals and their clients, peers, and mentors help create and reinforce interactional hierarchies in these spaces. Certainly, professionals in these firms have been socialized to be comfortable in mixed-gender settings. But although supportive peer interactions are necessary to create an environment of gender parity, women in elite law firms also are especially backed by an important external audience that does not actively discriminate on the basis of gender — their clients. Elite law firms in India, unlike their traditional counterparts, retain a “sophisticated” client base of international and high-end domestic clients. This setup affords a comparatively advantageous position — especially for women lawyers — for a range of reasons. First, many clients are comfortable with women in their workplace and as allies in transactions. Second, the nature of the legal work handled by these firms does not prime gender frames in lawyer–client interactions. Third, the closed market for legal services offers another interactional advantage — retained and repeating clients.

Foci

This chapter outlines the macro market reforms that framed the emergence of India's corporate legal elite. It begins by describing the exceptional mobility of these particular global professionals, highlighting the ways that their case differs from the kinds of mobility and praxis widely associated with other Indian professionals, both historically and in the present day. The chapter then uses the variations between the different kinds of global work in India to describe how the novel forms of institutional emergence within the legal profession were especially crucial in establishing the unique — and accidental — circumstances that allowed for the emergence of these women lawyers in elite transactional firms. Two specific consequences of liberalization reforms were central to this project's research design because they offered purchase for analytical sampling across cases. First, while some professional practices like litigation remained unaffected by liberalization measures, others, like international transactional law and management consulting, only emerged as a consequence of the foreign direct investment that liberalization permitted. Second, in addition to new kinds of work, market liberalization also introduced new kinds of work and workplaces.

Feminizing legal profesion in Santa Rosa: preliminary approach from gender perspective

The present work is part of the research project “Legal professions: impact of gender relations, family roles and care in the strategies of professional integration of lawyers in Santa Rosa”, whose purpose is to make an approximation of the positions that the women lawyers of Santa Rosa (La Pampa) occupy, in the professional work areas of the legal field, and observe how gender and family roles and care responsibilities affect their professional career. It will reflect on the relationship between the training of legal operators in higher education (HE), their professional practices and the re/production of gender stereotypes, since there is still a general collective imaginary that preserves the traditional model of femininity, by which differentiated conceptions of the characteristics and capacities of women and men are imposed on subjectivities. This imaginary acts in the lives of women inside and outside the universities in the form of discrimination, and the subjectivities constructed under these gender differential patterns are what ultimately shape the professional practice of law. The legal profession is conquered by stereotypes and differential gender relations that harm women, and despite the fact that the field of legal university study has been feminized, as well as public and private professional practice, there are still inequalities in the ways in which the legal profession is exercised by men and women. Therefore, it becomes necessary to make a critical theoretical reflection of the process of labor insertion of women lawyers and the relationship between profession, gender, family relations and care of the city of Santa Rosa, this work responding to the dual purpose of evidencing, while promoting the denaturation of gender segregation and inequalities against women.