The Rise of Women Lawyers in India

In Accidental Feminism, Swethaa Ballakrishnen, a rising scholar in the study of inequality in the professions and globalization, offers an illuminating account of the coincidental corpus of conditions leading to unanticipated gender equality within elite global law firms in India. Their eloquent analysis breaks new ground by skillfully tracing the range of conditions, each incidentally conceived, that coincided without intention to produce demographic parity for women lawyers in elite firms. Recent scholarship has explored the formation of legal elites in postcolonial India (Williams 2020), emerging corporate legal “ecosystems” of new domestic corporate law firms in India (Wilkins, Trubek, and Fong 2020), and the role of Indian lawyers in the transnational context of the World Trade Organization (Shaffer, Nedumpara, and Sinha 2015), yet there is a paucity of research on women lawyers in India (though see Mossman (2020) for a historical account of early women lawyers in India). Accidental Feminism fills a conspicuous void in the literature on legal professions.

[1]  Catherine Brennan.  Status , 2020, Max Weber on Power and Social Stratification.

[2]  M. Mossman.  Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954): a pioneer woman lawyer in Britain and India , 2020 .

[3]  Alexander Williams.  Imagining the Post-colonial Lawyer: Legal Elites and the Indian Nation-State, 1947–1967 , 2020, Asian Journal of Comparative Law.

[4]  David M. Trubek,et al.  Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies: The Rise, Transformation, and Significance of the New Corporate Legal Ecosystem in India, Brazil, and China , 2019, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[5]  Adriana Mica.  Sociology as Analysis of the Unintended , 2018 .

[6]  S. Correll.  SWS 2016 Feminist Lecture: Reducing Gender Biases In Modern Workplaces: A Small Wins Approach to Organizational Change , 2017 .

[7]  G. Shaffer,et al.  State Transformation and the Role of Lawyers: The WTO, India, and Transnational Legal Ordering , 2015 .

[8]  Ester Rizzi,et al.  Framed by Gender. How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World , 2013 .

[9]  Ethan Michelson.  Women in the Legal Profession, 1970-2010: A Study of the Global Supply of Lawyers , 2012 .

[10]  A. Bassi,et al.  Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields" , 2011 .

[11]  C. Ridgeway,et al.  Framed by Gender , 2011 .

[12]  B. Carruthers,et al.  The Recursivity of Law: Global Norm Making and National Lawmaking in the Globalization of Corporate Insolvency Regimes1 , 2007, American Journal of Sociology.

[13]  W. Powell,et al.  THE IRON CAGE REVISITED: , 1983, The New Economic Sociology.