Rosalind Dixon and Samuel Isaacharoff. “Living to Fight Another Day: Judicial Deferral in Defense of Democracy.” Wisconsin Law Review, vol. 2016, no. 4 (2016): 683-731.
As the lawyers movement in Pakistan so clearly demonstrated in 2007, the support of lawyers can also be critical to a court’s independence and effectiveness: when President Musharaf tried to remove Chief Justice Chaudhry, in part to avoid the likelihood that he would render a forceful decision seeking to limit the President’s own powers, mass demonstrations by the country’s lawyers helped ensure that he was reappointed. Even the unusual sight of lawyers mobilizing in street demonstrations was sufficient to permit the continued judicial independence needed to permit authoritative judgments curtailing the power of the political branches. In many countries, lawyers also operate as a more subtle or invisible, but equally important, source of support for the enforcement of judicial decisions: when court judgments have broad support from lawyers and the legal academy, it will often be difficult for the executive to avoid complying with those decisions; whereas if the decisions are the subject of widespread criticism, there will be much greater scope for executive disobedience.