Cause Lawyers, Political Violence, and Professionalism in Conflict

Abstract

This article examines how cause lawyers in conflicted and authoritarian societies balance their professional responsibilities as lawyers with their commitment to a political cause. It is drawn from extensive interviews with both lawyers and political activists in a range of societies. It focuses on the challenges for lawyers in managing relations with violent politically-motivated clients and their movements. Using the notion of`legitimation work', it seeks to examine the complex, fluid, and contingent understandings of legal professionalism that is developed in such contexts, offering three overlapping`ideal types' of cause lawyers in order to better understand the meaning of legal professionalism in such sites: (a) struggle lawyers (b) human rights activists and (c) a`pragmatic moral community'. The article concludes by re-examining how law is imagined in the legitimation work of cause lawyers in such settings and how that work is remembered in the transition from violence. 529

Technologies of justice: forensics and the evolution of transitional justice

“…Participants were selected following a purposeful sampling methodology, drawing on such criteria as professional capacity (i.e. judges, prosecutors, and forensic experts) and direct involvement with the cases (on purposeful sampling, see McEvoy, 2019). In-depth interviews with judges who ruled on these specific cases, coupled with analysis of the rationale of the court rulings, helped unpack the ways forensics affected the final verdict.…”

Beyond litigation: Policy work within cause lawyering organizations

“…To that point, we should ask if the lessons on agendas, accountability, and autonomy are generalizable to all cause lawyers. For various reasons, the organizations here do not fit neatly into theorized cause lawyering‐types (Hilbink, 2006; McEvoy, 2019). However, we can surmise that there may be distinctions between organizations that have different amounts of resources and staff.…”

The Legitimation Strategies of “Progressive” Prosecutors

“…Herbert argues that the police legitimize themselves by constructing an image of subservience to public demands and needs, and through tactics of “separation” from the public, marking out the ways in which their role is distinctive. More recent work by McEvoy (2019) on “cause” lawyers in conflict and transition zones focused on what he termed the “legitimation work” done by these lawyers. That is, attempts at rationalizing and articulating identities, strategies, relationships and practices, particularly in order to justify practices that were sometimes law-breaking in contexts of injustice.…”