This article explores the political positioning of lawyers in Hong Kong, challenging conventional theories in the sociology of professions that focus on status and market control.
Structure of the Legal Profession
Alford (2010), “‘Second lawyers, first principles’: Lawyers, Rice-Roots Legal Workers, and the Battle Over Legal Professionalism in China”
This article explores the development and significance of these parallel legal personnel systems in China’s legal modernization.
Provost (2015), “Teetering on the Edge of Legal Nihilism: Russia and the Evolving European Human Rights Regime”
This article examines the fragile state of the rule of law in Russia, highlighting its complicated relationship with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) since Russia ratified the European Convention in 1998.
Roberts (2005), “After Government? On Representing Law Without the State”
This article includes a call for greater caution in representing non-state orderings as law, noting that traditional markers of legal authority, such as legislators and judges, remain largely tied to the state framework.
Hsu (2019), “The Political Origins of Professional Identity: Lawyers, Judges, and Prosecutors in Taiwan’s State Transformation”
This article argues that moments of political upheaval shape the legal profession’s collective identity, showing how divergent experiences under authoritarianism in Taiwan led judges, lawyers, and prosecutors to develop distinct normative commitments based on their roles in resisting or navigating state power during democratization.
Khalil (2023), “‘We Belong to the Streets’: Lawyers and Social Movements in Post-Revolution Egypt”
This chapter argues that in authoritarian and transitional contexts like Egypt, the evolving precarity of the legal profession transforms cause lawyers into adaptive, embedded actors who blend legal advocacy with grassroots activism to resist repression and support social movements.
Ignacio Fradejas-García and Kristín Loftsdóttir (2024), “Mobility Cause Lawyering: Contesting Regimes of (im)mobility in the Canary Islands Migration Route to Europe”
This article examines how cause lawyers and allied actors collectively resist restrictive EU migration policies during the Canary Islands crisis by strategically using legal and human rights tools to challenge exclusionary practices.
Nader (1995), “Lawyers and Law Students as Tools of Democracy”
The passage highlights that the true role of lawyers is to prevent injustice and promote democracy, elevating law from a trade to a profession.
Pavone (2024), “Lawyering in Hard Places: Comparative Dispatches from the Margins of Legality”
The article argues that in authoritarian and transitional contexts, cause lawyers often defy traditional roles by challenging state-aligned bar associations, supporting contentious movements, and using unconventional tactics to confront judicial and political oppression.
Fu and Cullen (2008), “Weiquan (Rights Protection) Lawyering in an Authoritarian State: Building a Culture of Public‐Interest Lawyering”
China’s legal profession has rapidly privatized, leading to greater lawyer organization and social advocacy within the one-party state, despite ongoing government control.