The scholarship of the last two to three decades has challenged the classical, functionalist Anglo-American model of the professions. While autonomy and monopolies of practice may characterize many professions, phenomena such as professional consciousness and legitimacy, expert knowledge and codes of ethics may be equally defining. Such a broader and more nuanced interpretation of professionalization is especially helpful in examining the professions in late imperial Russia, which were traditionally categorized as "failures" when measured against the older, normative model. A revised understanding of the Russian professions in turn contributes to a reconsideration of the role played by the professions in the development of a civil society and democratic polity.

This paper will examine the experience of lawyers between the 1864 judicial reform, when trained and certified lawyers first appeared in Russia as an integral element in a Westernized court system, to the Revolution of 1905. The reform legislation included several prescriptions about the legal profession, but many issues remained to be tackled by the bar associations (established prior to 1905 only in the St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Khar'kov judicial districts). Bar associations' decisions regarding training, admissions, and permissible rules of practice reflect their efforts to establish professional identity and status, often in the face of governmental ambivalence and public suspicion. Thus, lawyers strove, with only partial success, to attain the legitimacy necessary to support their claims to autonomy and monopoly of practice.