From Legal Representation to Advocacy: Attorneys and Clients in the Ottoman Nizamiye Courts

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Professional attorneyship emerged in the Ottoman Empire in tandem with the consolidation of the Nizamiye (“regular”) court system during the late 19th century. This article analyzes the emergence of an Ottoman legal profession, emphasizing two developments. First, the Nizamiye courts advanced a formalist legal culture, exhibited, inter alia, by the expansion of legal procedure. Whereas the pre-19th century court of law was highly accessible to lay litigants, the proceduralization of court proceedings in the 19th century limited the legibility of the judicial experience to legal experts, rendering legal counseling almost indispensible in civil and criminal litigation. Second, the reformers made efforts to render state-granted legal license a sign of professional competence, presenting a formal distinction between the old “agents” (<jats:italic>vekil</jats:italic>s), who lacked formal legal training, and the professional “trial attorneys” (<jats:italic>dava vekil</jats:italic>s). In practice, however, lawyers of both categories had to adapt to the Nizamiye formalist culture.</jats:p>

What excludes women from landownership in Turkey? Implications for feminist strategies

“…The system's main aim was to regulate the international and commercial matters traditionally left out of the jurisdiction of the local sharia courts. Nizamiye courts were responsible for civil, criminal and commercial cases while cases of awqaf, inheritance, marriage, divorce and children remained the responsibility of local sharia courts (Rubin, 2012b).…”

“…In her work investigating the nineteenth-century Jaffa and Haifa court records, Iris Agmon (2006Agmon ( , 2003 finds that the Nizamiye system gave rise to a new legal culture in the local sharia courts. Firstly, since Ottoman women were not allowed to be professional attorneys (Rubin, 2012b), replacing self-representation with professional attorneys increased women's dependency on male attorneys. Secondly, the Hanefi School's appointment of kadıs as protectors of women against men's abuses was undermined and autonomy restricted by the imposition of increased obligations to local and central authorities (Agmon, 2006(Agmon, , 2003.…”

A Prehistory of the Modern Legal Profession in Egypt, 1840s–1870s

“…judge[s] to appoint an ad hoc attorney" to nonattending defendants lent further support to the impression that modern lawyering had become a possibility only in the mid-1870s. 9 By extension, when the archival record presented historians with instances of legal representation, they dismissed them as necessarily unprofessional aberrations. This attitude is exemplified in the scholarly treatment of the figure of the wakı̄l.…”