Becoming Global Lawyers: A Comparative Study of Civic Professionalism

Through their professional education and training, new lawyers are generally encouraged to adopt a civic vision of professional identity. This article explores convergences and divergences in how new lawyers entering an increasingly globalized legal profession conceive of their civic roles in different national contexts. In particular, I draw on interviews and a cross-cultural identity-mapping method to examine the lived experiences of civic professionalism among corporate-lawyers-in-training in the United States and China. I found that professional identity formation in the US sample is largely marked by role distancing and a sense of constrained public-interest expression. In contrast, Chinese respondents generally identified strongly with their civic roles, while framing their public contributions in pragmatic, state-aligned terms. I conclude with a comparative analysis of young lawyers’ bottom-up efforts to expand their civic impact.

China investment policy – ensuring the mice will be caught

Purpose This article analyses China’s attempts at economic revival, which, starting with the Foreign Investment Law, were under way before COVID-19 but which were given extra impetus by the onset of the pandemic. Design/methodology/approach The thought is that the Foreign Investment Law lacks detail, so this article looks at the three ideas with which the State Council is seeking to underpin it: key Industries, promoting investment and equal treatment. It also considers Shanghai’s experience as the first major municipality to implement the State Council’s guidance. Findings China is committed to more transparency and to opening more of its economy to foreign investors, even if it will continue to be selective about which industries it wishes to encourage. The central government wants other regional and local jurisdictions to follow Shanghai’s lead and implement its guidance, as well as bring forward more measures to make the environment more favorable for foreign investment. At the same time, the article notes that China faces some hostility from other nations and groupings, such as the US, UK and the EU, from which it would expect to receive investment. Practical implications Investors can expect more specific reforms in the different areas of the economy that China wishes to develop while recognizing that it needs foreign expertise to do so. Originality/value Insight from experienced corporate lawyers who are resident in China and have first-hand experience of the measures aimed at economic recovery.

The Hollowing Out of the Public Interest

This chapter analyses the transformative effects of the new pattern of public–private collusion on prevailing conceptions and categories of the public interest. This dynamic development can be seen by following the trail of the group of mobile and multipositioned civil servants or politicians who turned corporate lawyers. As they invent new professional know-how and career paths, they personify, more than any other group, the dynamics of this interstitial space. They collectively act as brokers between the various poles of this field, create points of convergence, and actively disseminate new ways of thinking of the state and its role vis-à-vis markets. The density of this field of public–private intermediation can also be measured by looking at a diverse range of seemingly secondary platforms, including professional colloquia, sector-specific congresses, and other policy-oriented meetings and discussion series that are explicitly aimed at bringing together public and private professionals. These arenas provide participants with opportunities to liberate themselves from their respective institutional or professional loyalties and to profess the virtues of public–private synergies.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the boundary between the public and the private, which is fundamentally different from other sectoral and professional boundaries. It conveys a whole set of representations and expectations pertaining to the autonomy of state-actors (whether politicians, bureaucrats, judges, or regulators) as they engage in their government activities; it also sets out procedures of deliberation and decision-making that are different on either side of the line, thus effectively determining the social space in which citizenship and equal treatment will hold sway. It may certainly be tempting to consider that such sensitivity to the public–private divide is idiosyncratically French as France has long epitomized the “strong state” par excellence, spearheaded by a ruling elite of lifetime civil servants. Indeed, it is the deep-seated sensitivity to the autonomy of the “public sphere” that makes France a particularly heuristic terrain when it comes to tracing the encounter between Western states and neoliberalism and revealing the transformative effects of the expanding public–private fault line. The chapter then considers corporate lawyers as tracers of the neoliberal turn of the French state.

The Neoliberal Republic

This book traces the corrosive effects of the revolving door between public service and private enrichment on the French state and its ability to govern and regulate the private sector. Casting a piercing light on this circulation of influence among corporate lawyers and others in the French power elite, the book analyzes how this dynamic, a feature of all Western democracies, has developed in concert with the rise of neoliberalism over the past three decades. Based on interviews with dozens of public officials in France and a unique biographical database of more than 200 civil-servants-turned-corporate-lawyers, the book explores how the always blurred boundary between public service and private interests has been critically compromised, enabling the transformation of the regulatory state into either an ineffectual bystander or an active collaborator in the privatization of public welfare. The cumulative effect of these developments, the authors reveal, undermines democratic citizenship and the capacity to imagine the public good.

Government by Relational Infrastructures: The Case of the Transnational Institutionalization of the European Unified Patent Court

This chapter analyzes the transnational institutionalization of the European Unified Patent Court (created in 2013) as a case illustrating government by relationships and mobilization of relational infrastructures in joint regulation of the economy. This court, specializing in patent litigation, originated from a public-private network of corporate lawyers, national judges, and European-level technocrats as institutional (or judicial) entrepreneurs, a collegial oligarchy using their own personal social networks across borders to start negotiating a common interpretation of the European patent and to lobby for the creation of the institution. A neostructural sociological approach is then proposed to frame this example in a more general perspective on institution building. This chapter identifies specific characteristics of institutional entrepreneurs who punch above their weight in regulatory processes, in particular the importance of being part of a collegial oligarchy and having several high, heterogenous, inconsistent, and multilevel dimensions of social status combined with the right rhetorics.