Pro-democracy advocates consisted of both international organizations and local activists, including lawyers, journalists, and politicians, who worked to challenge authoritarian regimes and promote democratic values.
Evidence of Lawyers’ Resistance
Cummings (2024), “Lawyers in Backsliding Democracy”
This article argues that lawyers can be key agents of democratic backsliding, using legal tools to erode institutions and legitimize autocracy, and calls for reforms to strengthen the profession’s role in defending democracy.
Scheppele (2018), “Autocratic Legalism”
In backsliding democracies where autocrats manipulate legal systems to entrench power, attorneys play a crucial dual role as defenders of constitutionalism and civic educators, documenting abuses, challenging authoritarian legal reforms, and empowering the public to recognize and resist the legalistic tools of autocracy.
Rosenzweig (2013), “Disappearing Justice: Public Opinion, Secret Arrest and Criminal Procedure Reform in China”
In February 2011, Chinese authorities detained numerous online activists and rights lawyers to suppress potential Arab Spring. This inspired unrest, using harsh interrogation and intimidation tactics, which later sparked public debate and legal critique over China’s criminal procedure laws.
Michalowski (1995), “Between Citizens and the Socialist State: The Negotiation of Legal Practice in Socialist Cuba”
An examination of both the relationship between the ideological and legal bases for the socialist practice of law in Cuba and the actual practice of law in one bufete colectivo.
Chua (2019), “Legal Mobilization and Authoritarianism”
An examination of legal power in the lens that authoritarianism is all over.
Piomelli (2009), “The Challenge of Democratic Lawyering”
Democratic lawyers believe-as much of the rest of U.S. society and the bar do not-that ordinary people, acting collectively with peers, receptive professionals, and other allies, can and must play a leading role in efforts to reshape our society and political
Luban (2021), “Complicity and Lesser Evils: A Tale of Two Lawyers”
This Article explores that dilemma in a stark form: through the moral biographies of two lawyers in the Third Reich, both of whom stayed on the job, and both of whom can lay claim to mitigating evil.
Fybel (2022), “Judges, Lawyers, Legal Theorists, and the Law in Nazi Germany”
This essay argues that the German legal system, including courts, judges, and lawyers, enabled and often supported the Nazi regime’s rise and its race-based atrocities by legitimizing Hitler’s incremental consolidation of power under the guise of law.
Kucherov (1953), Courts, Lawyers and Trials under the Last Three Tsars
A historical look at the 19th-century Russian legal profession, highlighting anarchist trials and how lawyers used jury nullification to win acquittals.