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Christopher Waters 8/23/01

While few Georgians have lived luxuriously in the past ten years, the state’s lawyers have charted a particularly rough course. All have faced corrupt police, investigators, prosecutors and judges. Police have threatened and abused some lawyers and cut them off from clients. Of course, a number of lawyers willingly participate in the corruption, acting as intermediaries between their clients and police. But, while many reforms of the legal system began in the late 1990s -including successful examinations for judges and a more compromised reform of the Procuracy �legislators ignored lawyers. Now, this profession is gaining its own code.

For the first ten years after independence virtually anyone could act as a lawyer, with or without training in the law. As was the case in the period following the Bolshevik revolution, when anyone with class credentials could act as counsel, a Georgian crony capitalist could act as a lawyer with no law school to accredit him nor any bar association to discipline him. This made the courts a free-for-all. As a condition of admission to the Council of Europe in 1999, however, Georgia had to regulate lawyers within one year. In June 2001, after dealing with more pressing matters such as an army revolt, Parliament passed a law on the bar. Now, as Georgia struggles with corruption in nearly every industry, its lawyers must prove that they can adhere to laws as stringently as anyone they might prosecute or defend. [For more information see EurasiaNet’s Eurasia Insight.]

That’s a difficult challenge, because many Georgian lawyers disagree about which people and what should govern their work. Though robbed of its courtroom monopoly, the governing body of advocates from Soviet times (the Collegium) continues to exist. During the debate it lobbied hard for a restoration of its powers. Younger lawyers were more divided. Some thought that a new law was unnecessary. They argued that lawyers could voluntarily join associations, such as the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association, which would raise overall standards as they compete for prestige. Others believed that while lawyers should earn licenses from the Ministry of Justice, they should not have to join an official Bar. These factions couldn’t agree in two years of debate on the role of a national bar. The law that emerged forges a compromise: it creates a bar association and requires lawyers to pass exams- but gives the old guard until 2003 to study.

As so many laws passed by Parliament exist only on paper in Georgia, one may fairly ask how effective the new Bar will be. To some degree, the Bar Association will have to keep its standards close to the "lowest common denominator" just to encompass everyone practicing law in Georgia. Although Georgian law schools graduate thousands of students each year, many of them offer dubious education. And even these schools can’t provide enough trained, active lawyers to meet the growing nation’s demand. This problem is particularly acute outside of Tbilisi. Those writing and administering the exam must make it stringent enough to confer legitimacy. But they must avoid making it so difficult that it leaves parts of the country without lawyers.

These problems will run directly into Georgia’s larger problems of corruption and economic crisis. There will also be difficulties in finding consensus on a code of ethics or methods of training new lawyers. In all likelihood, voluntary bars such as the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association will act as the primary groups with which lawyers identify. And reputation will continue to determine which lawyers earn the public trust. Now that lawyers operate under a code, they still must ratchet their own levels of excellence.

Editor�s Note: Christopher Waters is a doctoral candidate in law at McGill University in Montreal. He formerly taught law in Georgia with the Civic Education Project.

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