Jedidiah J. Kroncke. “Legal Complicity in an Age of Resurgent Authoritarianism.” Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, vol. 38, no. 1 (2025): 75-123.
This article critically examines the ethical and political assumptions that have shaped how liberal legal professionals, particularly in the United States, engage with authoritarian regimes. It traces how modernization theory—the belief that economic development would inevitably lead to democratization—provided a moral justification for legal engagement with authoritarian states like China. For liberal lawyers, this framework aligned with the idea of amoral professionalism and allowed them to view their work in such regimes as a force for eventual liberal transformation rather than complicity in repression.
However, the endurance and resurgence of authoritarian regimes globally, many of which have achieved sustained economic development without democratization, has undermined this narrative. The article argues that this reality calls for a re-evaluation of the ethical foundations of legal engagement in such contexts. The case of American lawyers working in post-1978 China is presented as a particularly salient example of this dynamic.
The article further contends that the erosion of faith in modernization theory exposes deeper tensions within liberal legal professions themselves. As authoritarian ideologies increasingly blur the line between domestic and foreign threats to democracy, legal professionals must confront questions about their independence, political function, and ethical obligations in both international and domestic settings. In backsliding democracies, lawyers are thus not only actors in resistance or complicity but also emblematic of the broader crisis facing liberal legal values.