Balancing between patronage and professionalism : an ethnographic account of lawyering in Malta

Abstract

Legal anthropology, the so-called 'centaur discipline' ( Geertz, 1983) which uses the insights and research methodology of social anthropology as its privileged medium for studying 'law; has increasingly been converging with criminology. This convergence is revealed by the increasing number of studies which seek to explore the terra incognita between the two disciplines (Parnell & Kane, 2003; Penglase, Kane & Parnell, 2009). This involves reciprocal learning and cross-fertilisation not only in terms of theoretical frameworks and in the crafting of research agendas, but also in developing more sophisticated methodological approaches; which draw upon the subtle and versatile armoury of ethnographic research techniques to develop new and enhanced ways to study crime. This chapter draws upon my fieldwork among Maltese lawyers operating mainly in the private law field and conducted in the mid-1990s in order to: (1) show how anthropological research can be usefully employed in order to explore how legal professionals carry out their work in the context of a modern Mediterranean society with a complex bureaucratic state apparatus and (2) suggest, mainly by way of insinuation, that similar research should be conducted in relation to the key actors in the field of criminal law, including particularly: "criminal" lawyers, adjudicators and police officers. Although it is a professional activity which is regulated by a code of ethics and which is the subject of intense scrutiny by lawyers themselves, this chapter aims to explore how lawyers perceive and construct their role in 'legal representation'; itself understood as a series of activities which must be contextualised to be properly understood. The power of the ethnographic methodology is shown to lie precisely in its ability to contextualise the performance of professional activity in terms of what Malinowski (1961) called the "imponderabilia of actual life", which can only be witnessed by the participant observer in a specific local setting. Thus this chapter shows how a set of practical dispositions (Bourdieu, 1990) motivates how Maltese advocates symbolically organise the space of their offices, craft their professional personas, present themselves to clients, move about the law-courts and interact with their clients.