Malcolm M. Feely. “An Introduction to Lawyering for the Rule of Law.” Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies, vol. 11, no 1 (2015): 1–5.
This article introduces a symposium on Yoav Dotan’s Lawyering for the Rule of Law: Government Lawyers and the Rise of Judicial Power in Israel, a landmark study of how state attorneys can both constrain and enable government power. Through the lens of Israel’s shifting political and constitutional landscape, Dotan explores how government lawyers navigate tensions between professional ethics, institutional loyalty, and political pressure. The book’s core insight—that government lawyers can act as agents of legal restraint and judicial empowerment—has significant implications for understanding the role of attorneys in contexts of democratic erosion.
As backsliding democracies increasingly politicize the legal profession, Dotan’s work provides a critical framework for analyzing how state attorneys balance complicity with resistance. The symposium captures a multidisciplinary dialogue on the role of legal professionals in defending constitutionalism and the rule of law from within state institutions, offering valuable insights for scholars of law, politics, and public administration in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes.