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 …
Zoltán Szente, “Stepping Into the Same River Twice? Judicial Independence in Old and New Authoritarianism.” German Law Journal, vol. 22, no. 7 (2021): 1316–26. Summary: The study seeks to answer the question of whether there are similarities between the methods used to limit judicial independence in Hungary during the last phase of the communist regime, …
B.C. Smith, Judges and Democratization: Judicial Independence in New Democracies (2nd ed.). Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2022. Summary: This second edition examines judicial independence as an aspect of democratization based on the premise that democracy cannot be consolidated without the rule of law of which judicial independence is an indispensable part. It pays particular attention to the …
Anthony W Pereira. “Of Judges and Generals: Security Courts under Authoritarian Regimes in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile,” In Rule by Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes. Edited by Tom Ginsburg and Tamir Moustafa, 23–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Summary: Few academic studies have taken the law and legal institutions under authoritarian regimes …