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Clerks and Clients: Paraprofessional Roles and Cultural Identities in Indian Litigation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Charles Morrison
Charles Morrison*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Accounts of the legal scene in Asia often refer in passing to the activities of a shadowy set of backstage characters encountered in the peripheries of the law. The assessment of the peripheral figures has varied. Only very recently have they received much direct attention from students of Asian social life and those concerned with planning social change. Earlier accounts came mostly from colonial administrators, law officers and occasionally from the local intelligensia (Morrison, 1972b: 327). These reports were invariably derogatory. They blamed these peripheral figures for a socially and economically destructive proliferation of litigation, and depicted them as swarming at the courts where for ill-gotten personal gain, they encouraged and facilitated lawsuits among the peasantry. But these figures were never described in much detail and their work seems rarely to have been observed at first hand. A variety of European terms were used to characterize them: “sea advocates,” “bush lawyers,” “touts,” and the like. Both lay and semi-official roles seemed to be included.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 9 , Issue 1: Litigation and Dispute Processing: Part I , Fall 1974 , pp. 39 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

*

This paper was originally prepared for a conference on “Legal Services to the Poor in the Developing Countries” organized by the International Legal Center, New York City, October, 1973. The research on rural social organization and on the district legal profession in Haryana, on which this paper is based, was undertaken with grants from the Foreign Area Fellowship Program, the National Science Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Neither the International Legal Center nor the four foundations are responsible for the views expressed here. I am grateful to Mr. Barry Metzger of the International Legal Center, to the participants in the 1973 conference, and to Professor Marc Galanter for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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