The Social Image of Lawyers: Adversarialism and Intermediation

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have witnessed a surge of academic and socio-legal activity that challenged the excessive reliance on lawyers and, at times, the very need for them. The rapid proliferation of information technology, digitalisation, and AI over the past two decades—coupled with consumerist trends and a ‘Do-It-Yourself’ culture—has put additional pressure on lawyers, with many believing that they are replaceable by machines and that their traditional role is unsustainable.

These views have often fueled and been fueled by anti-lawyer sentiments, which is well documented historically. Why, then, do lawyers attract negative social perceptions despite their indispensable role and their substantial public contributions? This article offers two sets of empirically testable hypotheses about the causes of such perceptions.

Rabeea Assy is a Professor of Civil Procedure at the University of Haifa Faculty of Law. He also serves as Vice Dean and Head of LLM program in administrative and civil law.

Professor Assy specializes in procedure and evidence. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Professor Adrian Zuckerman. Rabeea’s studies at Oxford were fully funded by the Oxford University Clarendon Fund, and his doctoral work was awarded two consecutive Modern Law Review prizes. Whilst a doctoral student Rabeea served as a Senior Editor and subsequently as the Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal.

Rabeea’s published work includes a book on the right to self-representation (Injustice in Person: The Right to Self-Representation, Oxford University Press, 2015); a chapter on parole proceedings in a compiled volume (also published by Oxford University Press, 2016); and a number of articles on civil procedure and evidence, published in such prominent journals. His main work, Injustice in Person (2015), has won the Mauro Cappelletti book Prize (2019) for the best book in procedural law published in the last five years. The book has also been reviewed by all the leading journals in England (including Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Modern Law Review, Law Quarterly Review, and Cambridge Law Journal), and several events have been held to discuss it.

Moderator: Benjamin Chen, Associate Professor & Director of the Law and Technology Centre, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law

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