This chapter examines how cause lawyers in conflicted and authoritarian contexts balance their professional responsibilities with their commitment to a political cause. It seeks to add to the existing literature on lawyers and social movements by offering a new comparative exploration of the relationship between cause lawyering and violent politically motivated movements and individuals. In particular, it considers how lawyers set the boundaries of their ‘professional project’ when managing relations with politically committed clients and collective movements. Using the notion of ‘legitimation work’, this chapter examines the complex, fluid, and contingent understandings of legal professionalism that are developed in such challenging contexts. To better understand the meaning of legal professionalism in such sites, it offers three overlapping ‘ideal types’ of cause lawyers: (a) struggle lawyers, (b) human rights activists, and (c) a ‘pragmatic moral community’. The chapter concludes by re‐examining the legitimating frameworks typically employed by each ideal type of lawyer.

Support for a common cause typically engenders a high degree of collegiality amongst lawyers but, even when united in pursuit of a political goal, closer examination tends to reveal internal divisions along the familiar fault-lines of race, ethnicity, class, age, and gender. Reflecting on what Jessie Bernard refers to as the ‘stag effect’ in much of the existing literature on cause lawyers – a disproportionate focus on the activities of men and ‘masculine’ causes – this chapter places a particular spotlight on gender. It draws mainly (though not exclusively) on interviews with female lawyers to explore personal motivation; paradoxical opportunities; the gendered consequences associated with ‘taking on’ legal work; how gender intersects with other variables for women lawyers in such contexts; and the ways in which gender equality is imagined and sometimes manipulated by the state during periods of conflict, authoritarianism and transition. In the final section, we reflect on how the women lawyers we interviewed asserted their agency in the face of significant structural and gendered constraints.

This chapter examines the role of lawyers in attempting to deal with the past through processes and institutions commonly referred to as ‘transitional justice’. First, we offer a brief overview of the evolution of transitional justice as a field of theory and practice. We then examine the role of lawyers in helping to shape transitional justice efforts, focusing on legalism and its consequences for the efficacy of transitional justice. We explore in particular the role of lawyers in the truth commissions of Chile and South Africa – including in the latter context the work of the Amnesty Committee element of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). We then examine the efforts of lawyers to use prosecutions and litigation to hold accountable those guilty of past human rights violations in Chile, South Africa, and Tunisia. In the last context, we were particularly interested in the role of the Tunisian Bar Association as a transitional justice driver. Finally, we reflect on lawyers as objects of transitional justice – wherein the legal profession itself is held to scrutiny for past actions during periods of conflict and authoritarianism.

This chapter examines legal boycotts and other styles of resistant engagement in what were often hopeless legal proceedings. Drawing in particular on the literature on resistance, performance, memory studies, and legal consciousness, as well as cause lawyers, we reflect on the role that law plays, not only as an instrument of struggle but also as a resource for envisioning a better society. We begin by exploring the perspectives of cause lawyers who decided to boycott legal proceedings, the relationship between such boycotts and broader social and political struggles, and the intersection between legal boycotts, legitimacy, and law in such settings. The second part of the chapter then examines why and how cause lawyers engaged in acts of legal resistance, including using courts as sites of instrumental and symbolic resistance, and using law as a form of memory work. In the final section, we explore the dialectic between boycott and resistant engagement and argue that, at the core of both strategies, is a ‘stubborn commitment’ to a vision of law and justice as a viable alternative to violence and repression.

Government lawyers should ensure that public officials act lawfully and in the public interest. Where the lawyers fail to fulfil this gatekeeper role, they can enable state engagement in illegality, authoritarianism, corruption, and human rights abuses. This chapter draws on sixteen interviews with current and former state lawyers in our case study sites. It situates their narratives within literature on government lawyers in democracies, legal ethics, authoritarian bureaucracy, and organisational culture to explore when they adhere to professional legal ethical standards, where they act outside those standards to resist wrongdoing, or become complicit. Factors explored include the significance of lawyers’ political and personal identities, beliefs, and relationships; the organisational structures in which they work; and their perceptions of what constitutes credible, ethical, and professional practice. We find that government lawyers in impaired rule of law settings have capacity to hold the line on ethics and legality, and at times are willing to use their discretion to resist policies that they view as illegal or contrary to the public interest.

The concluding chapter draws together the core themes of the book in light of the broader literature on conflict, authoritarianism, transitional justice, cause lawyering, and the broader sociology of law and the legal profession. In particular, we revisit the themes of exceptionalism, agency/resistance, legitimacy, and memory to illuminate the tools, tactics, and strategies that lawyers resort to when professional boundaries, ethics, and norms are compromised. In all of the sites under review, engaging in legal work that challenged the prevailing political regime required moral and political commitment and often entailed significant personal risk and sacrifice.

This chapter outlines this book’s contribution toexisting research on the sociology of the legal profession and cause lawyering in particular. It documents how these areas of scholarship have primarily examined the activities of lawyers within democratic states, whereas our focus is on how lawyers as ‘real people’ responded to the professional challenges of practising law in the difficult circumstances of conflict, authoritarianism, and transition. The chapter then provides a detailed account of the methodology and an overview of the empirical data underpinning the study. It concludes with an overview of the remaining chapters, with reference to key themes such as exceptionalism, agency/legitimacy and memory.

National and international lawyers are ubiquitous in transitional political negotiations. However, their role in advancing or stalling negotiations, or in advocating or resisting progressive change, is generally carried out behind closed doors. This chapter explores when and how lawyers living and working within repressive, conflicted, and transitional states influence the content of transitional political agreements. It draws on twenty-five interviews with lawyers who participated directly in negotiations and other informed commentators in our case study sites. Combining this empirical data with literature on lawyers as negotiators, the sociology of the legal profession, and critical international legal theory, the chapter explores the factors that shape relationships between lawyers and the political leadership in negotiations. The chapter further critically analyses the extent to which lawyers’ negotiating styles and legal skills can advance or inhibit the reaching of an agreement. The final section explores the discretion and capacity of lawyer-negotiators for legal imagination in crafting transitional futures. We find that lawyer-negotiations often have to grapple with reconciling their role as legal technicians with the ethical and political challenges of advising on law’s content at times when the law itself is indeterminate or subject to negotiation.

In places where national justice systems were unable or unwilling to deal with the abuses of the past, it is often victims and survivor groups, human rights NGOs and other civil society organisations that have historically provided services to and campaigned on behalf of those most affected by conflict. However, in the case of the tribunals established to deal with atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, once the wheels of international justice began to turn, there was a widespread concern that the voices of those affected became instrumentalised to meet the needs of these large and legalistic institutions. Local actors, and sympathetic international stakeholders, have since worked hard to ensure that such instrumenentalisation does not go unchallenged. International lawyers can no longer mask professional arrogance and the desire for exclusive control by deploying the rhetoric that they are simply ‘seeking justice’.

As evidenced by the chapters in this section, one detects an increased confidence among local actors concerning the capacity of civil society to complement, challenge, critique or circumnavigate the efforts of ‘top down’ initiatives such as trials or truth commissions which for many years appeared ‘the only show in town’. The more sophisticated version of such challenges is not in any sense a rejectionist discourse. Rather, as Richard Falk has suggested, the view ‘from below’ is really a way of providing a different vantage point in order to ‘see’ more clearly connections, accommodations and relationships with institutions and structures ‘from above’. Neither does it suggest a facile or overly romanticised notion of the community as a site of harmony. Instead, it recognises community as a site of potential violence, hierarchy and unequal power relationships. Good practice emerges and is sustained in such places through a cold-eyed assessment of risks and local capacity and developing ways to protect against those risks and enhance existing skills and abilities.

The four chapters here chart such interactions in different ways. Although there are a range of overlaps, perhaps the key overarching theme which links all four is the notion of legitimacy. In the context of transitional justice, legitimacy may be viewed as a way of conceptualising the relationships among justice, legality and power.