Projects
According to the official ideology of the socialist regime the profession of lawyers is doomed to disappear. However, this prophecy did not come true. In this project I will analyze the transformation of a liberal profession into a "state profession", using as an example the case of lawyers in socialist Bulgaria. The goal of the project is to help expand the research scope of sociology and history of professions under the conditions of soviet-type socialist regimes. The profession will be analyzed as a socio-and-historical construct rather than an objectively existing reality.
The project further aims to go beyond the state of the art and review the concept of "soviet-type professions" and to show that local specifics and inherited history play their part and lead to different types of professional, economic, and political practices.
The findings of the analysis will be compared to the results of a secondary analysis of data and literature concerning the soviet model of the lawyers' profession. The comparative study will show how the soviet model of the profession was applied in Bulgaria and will explore its local specifics.