This article examines how ethically driven Russian criminal defense lawyers, motivated by professional values and exposure to rights violations, could form a collective force to strengthen professional associations, push for legal reform, and hold law enforcement accountable within a deteriorating democratic system.
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.
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.
This study reveals how public interest lawyers strive to empower asylum seekers in Los Angeles despite facing significant challenges from a restrictive and politicized U.S. immigration system.
The article highlights how Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry’s challenge to military dominance in Pakistan sparked a nationwide lawyers’ movement that ultimately restored judicial independence and reshaped the country’s constitutional landscape.
The article explains how authoritarian regimes like Singapore exhibit legal hybridity by using law both to strengthen control and to limit their own power, blending elements of rule of law and rule by law.
The article explores the legal and ethical consequences for lawyers defending disputed election claims, proposing a new framework to balance First Amendment rights with professional responsibilities.
The article argues that current fears of democratic decline arise from unrealistic expectations rooted in Cold War-era progress narratives that presumed inevitable democratic consolidation.
The article examines how cause lawyers in authoritarian and conflict-affected societies balance legal professionalism with political commitment, using interviews and the concept of “legitimation work” to reveal evolving roles shaped by violence and transition.
The article argues that in Pakistan’s hybrid regime, lawyer-leaders and political parties, rather than courts alone, played a crucial role in judicial restoration, challenging traditional legal mobilization theories based on political liberalism.