This chapter seeks to understand ‘legal science’ from the internal point of view of each tradition and society, in order to avoid a conception too heavily influenced by contemporary views. To do so, reference is made both to the set of activities carried out by ‘legal experts’ in the whole domain of law (legislation, adjudication, legal counseling and education), and to the legal experts themselves, as far as they were regarded as such by their own societies. This approach requires first to establish the extent to which, in each society under consideration, knowledge of law was considered as autonomous knowledge. A sociological perspective is then adopted, identifying who in each society were considered legal experts, i.e. persons deemed to possess the legal knowledge to such a degree that it characterized their social position and/or function. The chapter then proceeds in a progressively more content-oriented manner towards a comparative description of legal science, focusing on how legal training took place in each society under consideration and in what literary forms the legal experts expressed themselves, to finally arrive at the core question, namely the description of the respective forms of legal reasoning.

This chapter outlines the workings of the common law. It starts out by providing a historical background to legal institutions, conceptual distinctions, pedagogy and literature constituting the common law tradition before going on to identify and discuss some of the core features of the common law’s method. The chapter also seeks identify factors causing convergences and divergences between the working of the law in many of the jurisdictions all over the world that tend to be classified as common law systems.

To become a lawyer in Australia you need to be admitted by the Supreme Court as a member of the legal profession. Regulating who can be a member of the profession is a ‘safeguard’ to protect against ‘incompetent or fraudulent’ lawyers. Admission requirements make sure only ‘fit and proper’ individuals with suitable qualifications and training are able to perform legal services. This protects the community and the integrity of the legal profession.

Once characterised as a relatively stable profession, unfettered by the influence of modernity and strongly resistant to external forces, the legal services sector has in recent years exhibited marked change. Efforts to preserve profit margins increasingly eroded by the introduction of new fee models, the demand for increased billing transparency, rising client expectations, the adoption of technology and heightened market competition from high volume legal process outsourcers, have all contributed to the sector’s evolution. In what has been viewed as a clear shift towards corporatisation and commercialisation, the legal profession in a number of jurisdictions has moved away from the broader social mission on which it was founded and in which it existed as ‘a branch of the administration of justice and not a mere money-getting trade’. Free market ideologies have undermined ‘justice and rights in the discourse of law’, and in its place, the generation of profit has become the primary indicator of success.

Chapter three tracks the geographical expansion of the legal reform, exploring the debates and negotiations around its implementation in Crimea and Kazan. In order to better contextualize this implementation, it first discusses the changing political climate after the Great Reforms and the limited politicization of the emerging public sphere, which also affected provincial cities such as Kazan. Pragmatic concerns over resources and infrastructure came to play as important a role as political and ideological concerns over power and authority. The chapter shows that the reform had to be negotiated carefully at the provincial and local levels, with occasional clashes disrupting the process, as a range of individuals and institutions advanced their positions and defended specific interests. In charting these negotiations and controversies, the chapter also paints a detailed ethnographic portrait of communication and administrative interaction in post-reform Russia.