Christos Boukalas. “Politics as Legal Action/Lawyers as Political Actors: Towards a Reconceptualisation of Cause Lawyering.” Social & Legal Studies, vol. 22, no. 3 (2013): 395–420.
This article examines the ‘resolutions movement,’ a popular political mobilization led by lawyers that operates through legal discourse and targets legal objectives as a form of resistance to contemporary US counterterrorism policies. Using this movement as a case study, the article critically evaluates existing cause lawyer literature and proposes a reconceptualization of ‘cause lawyers.’ It contrasts two approaches to understanding the political role of lawyering. The first, rooted in traditional cause-lawyering scholarship, relies on a sharp division between law and politics, which the article argues limits analytical depth. To address this limitation, the article introduces a ‘strategic-relational’ approach that views law and politics as intertwined social relations and practices. This framework enables a more nuanced analysis of the movement and offers proposals to overcome conceptual constraints in cause-lawyering studies.