Lawyers Without Law: How Informal Institutions Fill the Regulatory Vacuum of the Legal Education and Profession in Latin America

Lawyers are key actors for the institutional resolution of conflicts between citizens, and between citizens and the state. The regulatory framework of the legal education and of the organization of the legal profession are paramount, if relatively forgotten, factors that determine the quality of lawyers and therefore the quality of law firms and the justice system. In this paper, we first show that lawyers in Latin America tend to be educated and to exercise their profession under a regulatory void, especially when compared to their colleagues in European countries or the United States. In most countries in the region there are no minimum standards (e.g. no minimum curriculum, no national exam) that law graduates must meet to start their practice as lawyers. In most countries there are also no minimum requirements that practicing lawyers must comply with when exercising their profession (e.g. no mandatory association to a bar or professional association). Given this regional context, we then focus on Mexico to explore the consequences of this regulatory vacuum in the generation of informal and oftentimes pernicious practices regarding how lawyers do their work and relate to their colleagues, clients, and actors of the justice system. Based on a couple of original surveys of lawyers and judicial officials regarding their working practices, we unveil the normative and empirical expectations that sustain informal institutions around gender discrimination, hierarchy and verticality in the relations between persons with different ranks within law firms and the judiciary, and also inappropriate relations between litigant lawyers and officials within the justice system.