Britannica Sources used in this answer

Why did some early communist governments believe that lawyers would become unnecessary?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

illustration from Charles Dickens's Bleak House — Legal ethics Illustration by Hablot Knight Browne for Charles Dickens's *Bleak House*. Here Lady Dedlock is visited by her cunning old lawyer, who discovers her deepest secret and threatens to reveal it to her husband.

Early communist governments, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, were influenced by the ideology of Karl Marx, which posited that the state and all its associated institutions—including legal systems—would eventually "wither away" following the communist revolution.1

Because this ideology viewed law as a tool of the state and a product of the existing social order, the new regime initially sought to dismantle the prerevolutionary legal structure, including property, contract, and business law. Under this perspective, lawyers were considered unnecessary because the state and its formal legal institutions were expected to become obsolete in a classless society.1

However, this stance was not permanent. As practical governance challenges arose, leaders like Vladimir Lenin later reintroduced legal frameworks, such as the New Economic Policy, to facilitate economic function, eventually leading to the re-establishment of formal court systems and legal professions in various communist states.12