The legal complex and lawyers-in-chief

In their thought-provoking work on the “legal complex,” Terry Halliday, Lucien Karpik and Malcolm Feeley posit that those who have been trained as lawyers are likely to act on behalf of political liberalism to advocate for the realization of basic civil liberties and access to justice (Halliday and Karpik 1998; Halliday, Karpik and Feeley 2007, 2012). By broadening studies of the legal profession to the study of legally educated elites more generally and examining the way that these elites act in a variety of politically challenging contexts, Halliday, Karpik and Feeley (HKF) have imagined a new relationship between law and politics. In their hands, law is more than persons or institutions; law generally embeds a set of liberal ideas that guide the development of politics.