Steven D Schaff, “Contentious Politics in the Courthouse: Law as a Tool for Resisting Authoritarian States in the Middle East.” Law & Society Review, vol. 55, no. 1 (2021): 139-176
Summary: Under what conditions will individuals mobilize law to resist states that operate above the law? In authoritarian countries, particularly in the Middle East, law is a weapon the state wields for social control, centralizing power, and legitimation. Authoritarian legal codes are overwhelmingly more deferential to state authority than protective of citizens’ rights. Nevertheless, people throughout the Arab world deploy law to contest a broad array of state abuses: land expropriations, unlawful arrests, denials of jobs and welfare, and so on. Using detailed interviews in Jordan and Palestine, Schaff outlines a theory of law as a tool for resisting authoritarian state actors. Integrating qualitative insights with survey experiments fielded in Egypt and Jordan, Schaff tests this theory and shows that aggrieved individuals mobilize the law when they expect courts to be powerful and attainable allies in contentious politics. Schaff’s results further demonstrate that judicial independence does not uniformly increase authoritarian publics’ willingness to access courts.