Nature versus Nurture: A Comparison of Russian Law Graduates Destined for State Service and for Private Practice

• Published date: 01 April 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12122
• Author: Kathryn Hendley
• Date: 01 April 2019

Nature versus Nurture: A Comparison of Russian

Law Graduates Destined for State Service and for

Private Practice

KATHRYN HENDLEY

This article explores the mind-set of Russian law students on the cusp of graduation. Drawing

on a 2016 survey, the analysis finds that, despite having taken different paths to their degrees,

the respondents share a confidence in the Russian courts that distinguishes them from Russians

without legal education. Within the sample, a natural division is evident between those who plan

to go into state service and those who plan to go into private practice. Aspiring state lawyers

are more likely to support the policies of the Putin regime, even when they preference politics

over the letter of the law. This strongly suggests that the tendency of judges and state lawyers

within the criminal justice system to work as a team to ensure convictions is not solely the result

of workplace incentives, as had previously been assumed, but is an element of a worldview that

these lawyers share that predates their legal education. Aspiring private lawyers, by contrast,

are consistently more skeptical of the state. To the extent that they are later coopted by the

state, as studies of criminal defense lawyers suggest, such behavior would likely be the result of

a desire to endear themselves to investigators and prosecutors in order to ensure further

appointments to represent indigent clients.

Law students in the United States are famously socialized to think like lawyers.

1

Yet

sociologists of law have long recognized that they do not always think or behave simi-

larly. Schemes to categorize US lawyers abound, with the division of the profession into

hemispheres, one serving corporate clients and the other serving individuals, being the

best known.

2

The literature on lawyers in non–common law countries has tended to take

a different approach. Reflecting the divided nature of the legal professions in such coun-

tries, these analyses typically do not focus on the profession as a whole but instead bore

in on individual specialties. Doing so suggests that, in contrast to the US case, legal edu-

cation in civil law countries does not give rise to a single profession, but to multiple

professions.

In this article, I challenge the common wisdom for how we think about lawyers in civil

law settings. My research is grounded in the Russian case. Much like their counterparts

in other civil law countries, Russian legal practitioners tend to identify with their special-

ties and to introduce themselves as litigators (advokaty), prosecutors (prokurory),

Thanks are due to my Russian collaborators, who handled the logistics of fielding the survey, as well as the

respondents. Maayan Mor provided valuable assistance with data analysis. The research was funded by the

National Science Foundation (Award Number 1531001).

Address correspondence to: Kathryn Hendley, University of Wisconsin Law School, 975 Bascom Mall,

Madison, WI 53706, USA. Telephone: (608) 263-5135; Email: khendley@wisc.edu.

LAW & POLICY, Vol. 41, No. 2, April 2019

©2019 The Author

Law & Policy ©2019 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary

doi: 10.1111/lapo.12122

ISSN 0265-8240

in-house counsel (iuriskonsul’ty), notaries (notariusy), judges (sud’i), and so on. The

scholarly literature follows suit.

3

While the available studies have enhanced our knowl-

edge of the day-to-day realities of some subfields, they share certain shortcomings, both

empirical and theoretical. Many types of legal practitioners have been left out, including

the hundreds of thousands of lawyers in private practice who have opted not to take the

bar exam required to become advokaty as well as the multitude of lawyers within the

state bureaucracy. This piecemeal approach has stymied efforts to identify commonali-

ties among the various subgroups.

I begin by exploring the socialization of Russian lawyers.

4

I ask whether they emerge

from their education with a shared attitude toward law and legal institutions that distin-

guishes them from others. Somewhat surprisingly, my analysis, which is grounded in a

national survey of graduating law students, shows that they constitute a unique cohort.

I then turn to the question of how to conceptualize these newly minted lawyers. I find

that the traditional dividing lines for Russian lawyers, which were developed under state

socialism, have outlived their usefulness. I argue that when we include all variants of

Russian lawyers in the analysis, a natural dividing line emerges between those in private

practice and those who work for state institutions. This division reveals profound differ-

ences in terms of attitudes toward legal institutions and the state more generally that

help make sense of established behavioral patterns.

I. METHODOLOGY

My research departs from the usual approach: rather than studying the Russian legal pro-

fession in a piecemeal fashion, my project brings together, for the first time, all types of

legal practitioners as a single group.

5

Studying this group as a whole presented a number

of methodological challenges. Compiling a representative sample of practicing lawyers

turned out to be infeasible. There is no national organization that unites all lawyers. While

some subgroups, such as advokaty, judges, and notaries require their aspirants to pass an

exam that assesses their competence, most Russians working as lawyers are not licensed

and belong to no professional organization. Thus, working through bar associations, as

scholars studying US lawyers have done (Dinovitzer et al. 2004; Dinovitzer et al. 2009;

Plickert et al. 2014), would have replicated past studies that narrowly focused on

advokaty, the only type of lawyer required to belong to a bar association (e.g., Jordan

2005; Bocharov and Moiseeva 2016). US-based scholars have also relied on law school

alumni databases to generate samples of experienced lawyers (Cantrell 2007; Evans,

Dau-Schmidt, and Mukhopadhaya 2007; Dau-Schmidt et al. 2009). In Russia, however,

universities do not keep track of their graduates. Reflecting on this dilemma with my

Russian colleagues who organized the survey, we realized that our best option was to

gather law students on the cusp of graduation. Doing so allowed us to assemble a cross-

section of respondents with wide-ranging career goals inclusive of all the available special-

ties as well as those opting not to work in the legal field. We hope to return to this same

set of respondents periodically to track their career paths and levels of satisfaction.

In the spring of 2016, interviewers recruited and trained by my Russian colleagues

spread out across Russia to conduct face-to-face interviews based on a standardized

questionnaire with 2,176 prospective graduates from 163 law departments or fakul’tety.

Two independent samples were constructed: one for full-time students and another for

correspondence students. Among my respondents, 1,557 were full-time students, and

619 were correspondence students. Fakul’tety constituted the initial unit of analysis.

6

They were stratified based on whether they were public or private, and then again by

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148 LAW & POLICY April 2019