This study is an exercise in legal sociology, emanating from the Yale Law School’s Law and Modernization Program and the International Center for Law in Development. The central concern motivating it is how to make the legal profession a more positive force for social integration in developing nations.
The study takes as its point of departure, and as one of its points of reference, a program, initiated in 1969 and sponsored by AID and the Ford Foundation, to reform (i.e., americanize) legal education in Colombia, to make the practice of law more relevant to that country’s economic and social problems. The present study reflects a subsequent awareness that the failure of the legal profession to serve as an agent of social reform had to do not merely with defective legal education but much more with deeper features of Colombian society and institutions.
Lynch’s study begins with a brief historical sketch, which may be ignored as it is superficial and riddled with error. The heart of the book is in the subsequent chapters, based on interviews with random samples of 1950-51 and 1966-67 graduates of six Bogotá law faculties. Lynch, not surprisingly, finds a clear class difference between the graduates of two elite private universities (el Rosario and the Jesuits’ Javeriana) and two universities offering night-school instruction (Universidad Libre and Externado). Graduates of the elite universities tended to have been bom in large cities; many had fathers with university educations and who were professionals, public figures, private executives, or large landowners. And in their subsequent careers many became executives or served as legal advisers to corporations. Graduates of the Libre and Externado, by contrast, came predominantly from smaller towns; few of their fathers had university educations; and most of their fathers were medium-sized merchants or farmers. In their subsequent careers they for the most part ended up in the litigation of small cases for individual clients rather than being linked with large corporations.
Lynch goes on to examine the functioning of the legal profession in various contexts. The court system at its lower levels is heavily staffed by young lawyers on their way to other things; it lacks prestige and it is riddled with influence-peddling and corruption. Lawyers in government administration tend to be highly legalistic and not to see the law as an instrument for fostering development. Government service also is a route to more lucrative jobs in private life, which means government lawyers do not always represent the public interest effectively. Those private lawyers who represent the poor, as might be expected, are distant from their clients and give their cases only cursory attention.
Lynch concludes that, given the substantial resistance posed by existing institutional structures and established career patterns, there is little hope of improving the system through educational reform. And so another well-intentioned experiment in United States developmentalism bites the dust.
