Defending Rights in Russia: Lawyers, the State, and Legal Reform in the Post-Soviet Era, Pamela A. Jordan, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005, 10, pp. 285.

In this carefully researched, richly documented and engagingly written volume, Pamela Jordan, a political scientist by training and a historian by choice, turns the theoretical lens towards advokatura, the Russian bar, in order to explain the role of lawyers (advocates) in building post-Soviet democracy. In doing so she fills an important gap in the growing literature on the post-Communist judiciary concerned primarily with the position of courts (most prominently, Supreme and Constitutional courts) and the independence of judges and prosecutors from the executive and legislative branches of government. She also considers the often tense relationship between Communist legacies and democratic judicial reform and between home-grown models and Western-inspired implants.