Heba M. Khalil. “Advocates Against Rights: The Conservative Lawyers Policing Gender and Sexuality in North Africa.” Law & Society Review 60, no. 2 (2026): 111–135. https://doi.org/10.1017/lsr.2025.10078.

This paper engages with the literature on the right against rights and autocratic legalism to examine the context and tactics of conservative legal mobilization against rights in North Africa. Drawing on legal case studies, interviews, and court observations in Egypt and Tunisia, I argue that in contexts of illiberal legality, law and rights discourses become the legitimizing tools of conservative mobilizations. The case studies presented reveal three primary tactics used by conservative legal actors in Egypt and Tunisia in their assault on gender and sexuality rights. The first, rights selectivism, is a tactic of referencing a set of rights to legitimize the oppression of other rights. Second, by deploying repressive legalism, conservative legal actors resort to tangential legal codes to punish minorities and those advocating for minority rights. Third, through appeals to majoritarianism, democracy, and anticolonial work are used to trump minority rights. This study contributes to emerging sociolegal scholarship on the right against rights and illiberal legality by illustrating how rights and legality are weaponized to advance antirights, antigender, and antiminority agenda.