Globalization, Lawyers, and India: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis of Globalization Studies and the Sociology of the Legal Profession

Despite the importance of globalization for Indian lawyers, there have been surprisingly few attempts to integrate the rich scholarship on the processes of globalization with the sociology of the Indian legal profession, and to conceptualize and explain major recent legal developments in India in this context. This article uses three globalization processes – economic globalization, globalization of knowledge and globalization of governance – as lenses for analyzing the Indian legal profession. It argues that understanding these processes and their intersections can help frame a muchneeded empirical investigation into the globalization of the legal profession in India, and possibly in other major emerging economies. 1. Globalization and the legal profession in India “With changes in a country’s stage of development come new challenges, which have to be met via a reform process... The legal profession must rise to the new opportunities that come about as a result of India moving to take her rightful place among the leading nations of the world... India deserves to be a leader in the global legal industry – this is our faith, our belief and our vision.” Dr. M. Veerappa Moily, India’s Minister for Law and Justice, 2010 It is by now common knowledge that globalization is transforming virtually every sector of the world’s economy, and that this transformation has important implications for the rapidly globalizing market for legal services. At the same time, as economic power shifts, India, China and other emerging economies are becoming central players in this market. While scholars studying the legal profession have been increasingly interested in the globalization of the profession in general, there has been little debate about the effects of various globalization processes – economic and noneconomic on the Indian legal profession, and recent scholarly attention to legal developments in India has largely focused on legal process outsourcing and foreign law firm entry. These studies have laid a solid foundation for thinking about the integration of the Indian legal market in the world economy and about the growing interactions between the Indian legal community and legal communities in the US and other advanced economies. However, the analytical field is ripe for theoretical expansion driven by inquiry into how globalization changes the broader architecture and dynamics of the Indian legal profession. In the pages that follow, this article draws together globalization literature with the scholarship on the sociology of the legal profession, situates the Indian legal profession at the center of globalization debates and demonstrates how its structure and characteristic