ABSTRACT

Unlike their counterparts in other European countries, Italian lawyers today still comprise a substantial component of the national political elite, even though their huge numerical growth over the past thirty years has objectively weakened this position. We may speak of Italy as a case of exceptional resistance raised by the classic pattern of legal elites, which have neither lost all their traditional power nor withdrawn from politics to confine themselves to professional practice alone. This resistance of the traditional model has nevertheless not prevented the Italian legal profession from being characterized by a markedly precocious propensity to be “contaminated” by the economic sphere. Italy’s early openness to the corporate economy laid the groundwork for the formation of a new legal elite, a part of which has recently acted as the channel by which new models of professional organization originating in Anglo-American countries have entered Italy. The classic model of the Italian legal elite has been characterized by the fol-

lowing features: political participation; a frequent combination of the exercise of the profession and university teaching; social closure and strong rootedness at the local level; a marked propensity to negotiate with political powers; and a notable ability to grasp change and adapt to it. Since the 1990s, the main challenges to this classic model of the Italian legal elite have come from globalization and the advent of new transnational professional cultures. This chapter investigates the extent to which the Italian legal elite has changed under the impact of professional models originating from other countries; whether it has preserved its traditional features, or whether it is now entirely patterned on Anglo-American professional models; and the role of certain endogenous factors in regard to this process of change.