This article examines the role of lawyers in resisting democratic backsliding and authoritarian policymaking in the United States, particularly during the Trump administration.
This book provides a powerful analysis of the role of human rights lawyers operating within an authoritarian legal regime, focusing on China.
This article explores the underexamined role of lawyers operating within manifestly unjust procedural regimes, particularly in the context of liberal democracies under internal stress.
This book reimagines legal ethics as a commitment to the law’s role in resolving deep societal conflicts and maintaining political stability, rather than as a license for lawyers to bend legal rules in service of client interests.
This article explores the complex role of legal reform within authoritarian regimes, focusing on activist lawyers in China who strive to use the law to protect rights and promote social change.
David Kennedy’s critical legal scholarship challenges the traditional monopoly lawyers and legal scholars hold over defining law’s purpose, highlighting law as a form of political struggle rather than a neutral system.
This article argues that attorneys have a duty to act as guardians of justice in a legal order fraught with moral ambiguity and political pressure.
The article argues that the legal profession’s shift to “neutral partisanship” in 1969 undermines lawyers’ ability to uphold justice and democracy by suppressing moral and ethical engagement.
Yueduan Wang, “The More Authoritarian, the More Judicial Independence? The Paradox of Court Reforms in China and Russia.” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, Vol. 22, no. 2 (2020): 529-560. Summary: Drawing conclusions largely from democracies, existing theories often positively associate judicial independence with political competition. This Article argues that a negative relationship exists …
Tate C. Neal and Stacia L. Haynie, “Authoritarianism and the Functions of Courts: A Time Series Analysis of the Philippine Supreme Court, 1961–1987.” Law & Society Review, vol. 27, no. 4 (1993): 707–40. Summary: Focusing on the independent and powerful pre–martial law Philippine Supreme Court, the authors investigate the impact of the establishment and breakdown …