Lawyers often play pivotal roles in building democracies. Pamela Jordan's engaging study of the Russian bar (advokatura) provides a richly textured portrait of how, after the USSR's collapse, practising lawyers called advocates began to assume new, self-defined roles as contributors to legal reform and defenders of rights in Russia.

Using the historical institutionalism approach as her analytical framework and drawing from comparative literature on legal professions, Jordan argues that the post-Soviet advokatura as an institution gained more, although not complete, autonomy from the...