Catalonia's Advocates

Offering a window into the history of the modern legal profession in Western Europe, this title presents a history of lawyers in the most industrialized city on the Mediterranean. It explores such issues as the attributes of the modern legal profession, how lawyers engaged with the Enlightenment, and how lawyers promoted fin-de-siecle nationalism.

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This title presents the social history of a continental bar. Offering a window into the history of the modern legal profession in Western Europe, Stephen Jacobson presents a history of lawyers in the most industrialized city on the Mediterranean. Far from being mere curators of static law, Barcelona's lawyers were at the center of social conflict and political and economic change, mediating between state, family, and society. Beginning with the resurrection of a decadent bar during the Enlightenment, Jacobson traces the historical evolution of lawyers throughout the long nineteenth century. Among the issues he explores are the attributes of the modern legal profession, how lawyers engaged with the Enlightenment, how they molded events in the Age of Revolution and helped consolidate a liberal constitutional order, why a liberal profession became conservative and corporatist, and how lawyers promoted fin-de-siecle nationalism. From the vantage point of a city with a distinguished legal tradition, ""Catalonia's Advocates"" provides fresh insight into European social and legal history; the origins of liberal professionalism; the education, training, and practice of law in the nineteenth century; the expansion of continental bureaucracies; and, the corporatist aspects of modern nationalism.