11/24/2008 Sida Liu,
University of Chicago
The Logic of Fragmentation: An Ecological Analysis of the Chinese Legal Services Market
This study explains why China’s legal reform since the late 1970s has produced a fragmented legal services market in which lawyers face competition from a variety of authorized and unauthorized occupational groups. Following the Chicago School tradition, the author develops an ecological theory of professions and the state and proposes boundary-work and exchange as its two processes of interaction. Based upon 256 in-depth interviews with law practitioners and public officials in 12 provinces of China, archival research in four academic libraries, and three years of ethnographic work on a professional internet forum, the author argues that the fragmentation of the Chinese legal services market in the thirty-year legal reform was mainly produced by the fragmented political structure of its state regulatory regimes. Chinese lawyers’ boundary-work in the market is unsuccessful because their exchange with the state is often not as strong and stable as their competitors. The study presents a systematic theory for understanding professions and the state, and it theorizes boundary-work and exchange as the two basic processes of social differentiation and integration.
Monday, November 24
3:30 pm
311 Condon Hall
Sida Liu is a Ph.D. Candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago and a Research Associate at the American Bar Foundation. Before coming to Chicago, Sida received his LL.B. degree from Peking University School of Law. His dissertation, The Logic of Fragmentation: An Ecological Analysis of the Chinese Legal Services Market, develops an ecological theory of professions and the state to explain why China’s legal reform since the late 1970s has produced a fragmented market for legal services. Besides the dissertation project, Sida has also written widely on various aspects of China's law reforms and legal profession, including lower court justice, popular legal advice, the criminal justice system, and the corporate law market. He has published articles in the Law & Society Review (twice) and Law & Social Inquiry, as well as extensively in leading law and social science journals in China. His first book The Lost Polis: Transformation of the Legal Profession in Contemporary China (in Chinese) has recently been published by Peking University Press.
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