Shih-Chun Steven Chien on Cultivating Sense: Cultural Change in the Prosecutor's Office

Shin-Chun Steven Chien, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, School of Law, has published Cultivating Sense: Cultural Change in the Prosecutor's Office. Here is the abstract.

Prosecutors exercise broad discretion. They are widely viewed as the gatekeepers of the criminal justice system. To date, studies on prosecutors in different jurisdictions have largely focused on how to conceptualize, manage, and eventually control the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Scholars have recently turned their attention to the importance of internal organizational management and leadership’s role in changing office culture as a means to regulate prosecutorial discretion. But we have limited empirical evidence as to how changes occur within a prosecutor’s office and what precise role organizational leaders play during this process. This Article constructs a new paradigm for the understanding of cultural change within prosecutors’ offices. It reveals a troublesome paradox about modern prosecutorial power: to transform organizational culture, prosecutors need to forge a new type of power based on what I refer to as “sense-making authority.” Meanwhile, the same power enables prosecutors to create an opaque process that bypasses organizational structure and reduces external accountability. To build my theory of cultural change, I rely on a comparative case-study approach based on ethnographic research. The research sites of the Article were a group of district attorneys’ offices led by “progressive prosecutors” across the United States and a district prosecutor’s office located in a metropolitan area of Taiwan. This Article proposes a contested cultural change model and explores ways in which the model could contribute much-needed theoretical and strategic groundings to the comparative study of prosecutorial reforms across different jurisdictions.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Influence of the French Bar on the Development of the Russian Legal Profession

Elizaveta Blagodeteleva, National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow), has published The French Bar and the Emerging Legal Profession in Russia as Higher School of Economics Research Paper No. WP BRP 110/HUM/2015. Here is the abstract.

The complex and seemingly inconsistent use of the social vocabulary has been on the research agenda of those who study the Russian Empire for quite some time. Historians have long believed that the indiscriminate use of such terms as "estate" ("soslovie") and "corporation" reflected Russian backwardness and eventually impeded further social and economic development, especially when it came to professional groups. The paper examines this assumption by focusing on the terminology deployed for the designation of Russian lawyers, in comparison to their French counterparts. Therefore, it dwells at length on the references to the French Bar in the bureaucratic discussion and in current press at the time of drafting the basic principles of the future Bar organization in Russia between 1857 and 1864. The comparison of the two sets of references provided plenty of evidence that the French notion of the estate (l'ordre des avocats) had a dramatic impact on the interpretation of Russian soslovie of legal practitioners. The French model seemed to spur social imagination and eventually helped Russian political and intellectual elites envisage a new type of social organization encompassing free, well-educated and politically engaged men.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.