In his presentation, Andrei Yakovlev will consider the evolution of the legal profession in Russia since the 1990s, including interactions between the Kremlin and the professional elite in the 2000s, conflicts between the Federal Bar Association and ordinary lawyers in the 2010s, and the failure of the legal profession in Russia in the 2020s. He will provide some lessons from recent Russian experience in comparison to historical cases of collective actions of lawyers in Taiwan, Pakistan, and Tunisia.

Andrei Yakovlev is an economist whose main research interests include state-business relations in Russia, political economy of development, industrial policy, public procurement, and incentives for bureaucracy (with a comparative study of Russia and China). From 1993 to 2023, he worked at the HSE (Higher School of Economics) University in Moscow as director of the Institute for Industrial and Market Studies. In 2011-2022, together with Timothy Frye of Columbia University, he led HSE's International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development (ICSID). In 2015-2019, he served as president of the Association of Russian Economic Think Tanks (ARETT). In 2017, he was awarded the Gaidar Memorial Prize in economics. He is the author of "Agents of Modernization" (HSE, 2006) and the paper "Composition of the ruling elite, incentives for productive usage of rents, and prospects for Russia’s limited access order" (Post-Soviet Affairs, 37(5), 417–434). In 2022-2023, he worked at the Davis Center as a visiting scholar. From November 2024, he is a visiting researcher at Freie Universität Berlin.