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This chapter focuses on cause lawyering in Congress. Its subject is the group of advocates representing disabled persons during the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (A.D.A. between 1988 and 1990. Analysis of cause lawyering within a political institution throws light on new aspects of legal professionalism and the state. As depicted here, lawyering for legislative reform on behalf of a politically and socially disempowered group does not adhere to the conventional client–lawyer–state model, which treats the interests of both the client and the state as determinable, and assigns a mediating role to the lawyer. Rather, it presents a model in which the interests of both the client and the state are defined and developed as part of the legislative process, as a field of “sub‐political” interaction. This chapter examines the political space within which such interaction takes place.

This chapter presents an exercise in the practical application of the sociology of knowledge, the key question being the variety of often-conflicting descriptions that are publicly available on the content and nature of new religions. Various types of perspectives about the movements are delineated with an discussion of “where they are coming from” — that is, what are the underlying interests concerning the movements that motivate the members of different categories of “cult-watching groups” — how the methodology they employ results in their selecting certain aspects of the movements' beliefs, practices, and organization (and ignoring other aspects) in the construction of their images of the movements.

Globalization and democratization are creating new types of social relations, and thus new dimensions of state power. This in turn creates new rights and obligations, or extensions of existing ones, which can be exploited by cause lawyers in pursuance of their various ideological and redistributive projects. This chapter explains the general processes at work, and summarizes the individual case studies that comprise the remaining chapters of the book.

This chapter examines two key areas in which cause lawyers are active in Ghana – womens’ rights and economic development policy. The analysis is based on interviews with mid‐level professionals, and details what their objectives and outlooks have in common.

This chapter focuses on the contributions of Israeli and Palestinian cause lawyers to the creation and development of a human rights movement in Israel and Palestine, with particular focus on the protection of the rights of residents in the Occupied Territories, and on the work of lawyers within the Israeli military court system. Their activities demonstrate that mobilization around the cause of human rights is not an effect of globalization but one of its manifestations.

This chapter examines the background and litigation proceedings in the case of Dow Chemical Company and Shell Oil Company versus Domingo Castro Alfaro (et al.), a case in which a Texas personal injury firm attempted to police the misconduct of a group of multinational corporations operating in Costa Rica by filing suit in Texas. The litigation in the Alfaro case involved allegations of wrongful exposure to pesticides of workers employed on a U.S. banana plantation, whose crop was shipped to the U.S.A. The defendants argued that the Texas court lacked jurisdiction to hear the case. In a ruling that sent shock waves throughout the international business community, the Texas Supreme Court disagreed. The Alfaro case opened up a new vista of transnational litigation for cause lawyers.

The protracted civil war in El Salvador during the 1980s led to a substantial increase in illegal migration into the U.S.A., and to a consequent economic dependency, despite U.S. anti‐immigration policy, on the remittances sent back to El Salvador by migrant workers. The situation that developed produced a fertile arena for cause lawyers engaged in supporting the rights of immigrants – not always working to adequate professional standards. Cause lawyers's advocacy work was not limited to helping immigrants discover loopholes in U.S. immigration law, but served to change the law itself through the mobilization of transnational constituencies.

The neoliberal agenda initiated under the Thatcher government had a major impact on the legal profession in the U.K., by dismantling its protective practices, and by substantially reducing the legal aid budget as part of its assault on welfare expenditures. The legal profession saw this as derogation from its legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion, or erosion of its symbolic social capital, and responded by an increased focus on cause lawyering and by assuming a greater burden of pro bono work.

In an effort to show toughness on crime, the symbolism of a greater readiness to inflict capital punishment has attracted many state authorities in the U.S.A. This has in turn provoked a heightened concern within the legal profession for the maintenance of judicial standards in respect of capital causes. This chapter explores the unstable relationships between cause lawyering, the organized bar, and state prosecutors, with the objective of highlighting the symbolic social capital, which cause lawyers seek to create in this area.

The conventional distinction, between the dispassionate “hired gun” lawyer and the committed cause lawyer, appears not to work in the case of Israel, where there have been cases of lawyers crossing the divide between pro‐Palestinian human rights work and pro‐Israeli government work. This chapter assesses the implications for cause lawyering of such changes of allegiance, and of the extent to which it reflects the impact of globalization on the practice of human rights law.

The example of land rights litigation in South Africa challenges the assumption that cause lawyering is inherently adversarial, and shows how commitments to client demands have become suffused with a wider responsibility to democratic accountability in the postapartheid era.

This chapter analyzes two instances of Israeli land segregation policy in the township of Katsir; in the first, an Arab couple petitioned the Supreme Court of Israel against their rejection, on grounds of ethnicity, of residency entitlement; in the second, Jewish residents appealed against a covert deal by which an Arab family had acquired property rights in Katsir via a Jewish intermediary. In both cases, the advocacy of cause lawyers has illustrated how major questions of state policy are being decided, not by the state, but by activism at municipal level.

This chapter examines the formation, role, and dynamics of cause lawyer networks in postauthoritarian Latin America, and the linkages between such networks and the processes of globalization and democratization. In this context, it considers the extent to which their origins and sources of financial support (much of which comes from abroad) affect their agendas, legitimacy, and effectiveness. However, while globalization provides opportunities for cause lawyer networks to benefit from external alliances, the extension of the rule of law to newly emerging democracies may constitute another form of imperialism and neocolonialism.

This chapter examines the extent to which the Israel Union for Environmental Defense (I.U.E.D.), an Israeli environmental law group created on the model of the U.S.A's Natural Resources Defense Council (N.R.D.C.), has succeeded in influencing Israeli government policy on environmental issues, despite substantial difference in respect of national political sensitivities and priorities. A review of the I.U.E.D's performance illustrates how it has had to counter local perceptions of being a “U.S. import”, by shifting attention away from its global links and toward its concerns with indigenous issues.

This chapter examines the transnational linkages, patterns of exportation and continuing connections between cause lawyers in the U.S.A. and in Latin America, and how in each region they influence, and are influenced by, transformations in governance. It argues that human rights organizations and lawyers, funded largely by U.S. philanthropic foundations, mobilized the international community in efforts to stop local human rights abuses, and thereby played a leading role in challenging authoritarian regimes in Latin America and in paving the way for democratization. However, their very success has now weakened their influence, and it is questionable how firmly rooted their achievements will turn out to be.

This chapter attempts to sum up the achievements of cause lawyers in furthering liberal democratic values, and how the nature of their interaction with state structures has affected their capacity to do so under various conditions of governance.

Self-governance and self-regulation are defining characteristics of all professions. The preamble to the American Bar Association (ABA) Model Rules of Professional Conduct acknowledged why professions claim such authority: “To the extent that lawyers meet the obligations of their professional calling, the occasion for government regulation is obviated”. But these core powers are ambivalently asserted, expediently exercised, and constantly contested. This chapter traces the institutional history of lawyer discipline in California in order to show how the system's capacities and limitations influence the way it constructs lawyer deviance.