Elite lawyers in Türkiye: Educational capital, status hierarchies, and feminization

Abstract

Sociological studies on elite lawyers working in large law firms have recently extended to non-Western countries. Based on a quantitative dataset comprising 1,303 lawyers from 106 Turkish law firms, this article aims to be the first empirical investigation of the social profile of lawyers in the rising large law firms in Türkiye. The analysis focuses on how characteristics of Turkish elite lawyers, in terms of educational capital, gender, and status are distributed. The objective of the analysis is to discover to what extent the expansion of legal education and rise of the private universities are reflected in the structure of elite law firms. To discover the relationships between university type, gender, and position at job, chi-square, and logistic regression analyses are conducted. Main findings are that the Turkish elite lawyers constitute a stratum where the most advantageous educational capital is concentrated compared to the profession in general, the lawyers working in the employee position are relatively young and have mostly private university degrees, and the increased feminization of the profession is closely intertwined with the status hierarchies.