An Introduction to Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies: The Case of India
In: The Indian Legal Profession in the Age of Globalization: The Rise of the Corporate Legal Sector and its Impact on Lawyers and Society, Cambridge University Press, May 2017; ISBN 9781108211024
HLS Center on the Legal Profession Research Paper No. 2018-1
37 Pages Posted: 27 Jan 2018
Date Written: May 1, 2017
Abstract
This book is the first in a series by the Project on Globalization Lawyers and Emerging Economies (GLEE). GLEE examines how globalization is reshaping the market for legal services in important emerging economies such as India, Brazil, and China and how these developments are in turn contributing to the transformation of the political economy in these countries and the reshaping of the global legal services market. In this first book of the GLEE project, we present original empirical research documenting how India’s legal profession is being transformed by the “global shift” that the world’s largest democracy embarked on in 1991 when it began the process of moving from an essentially closed state-controlled economy to one that is still state-led, but also increasingly open to foreign investment and influence.
As the book’s 20 empirical studies demonstrate, this shift in India’s economy has produced a new “corporate legal hemisphere” that is playing an increasingly important role in the Indian legal profession, the development of the Indian economy, the elaboration of its administrative state, and in India’s capacity to exert its influence in the new global order. Together with the GLEE project’s current work in Brazil and China, and the forthcoming expansion of the project to the Middle East, Africa, and the CIS states of the former Soviet Union, this book begins an important and largely unexplored debate about how the creation of a “corporate legal hemisphere” in emerging economies is contributing to the broader processes of globalization.
Keywords: India, Globalization, Legal Profession, Law Firms
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