Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2022
While cause lawyering has attracted abundant scholarly attention, the factors contributing to such movements in nondemocratic environments remain understudied. This article evaluates existing explanations of strategic litigation and finds that emphases on legal opportunity structure and resource mobilization overlook cases where litigation is used to expose and challenge existing constraints. This inductive study of revolutionary Ukraine shows that litigation is pursued despite unfavorable legal opportunity structure and may be triggered by state repression, rather than constrained by it. I argue that a democratic revolutionary movement in the country offered the necessary social resources for cause lawyers to succeed.
The author wishes to thank Jordan Saner and Aliyah Price for research assistance, as well as Jamie Mayerfeld, Jayanth Krishnan, Kathryn Hendley, Linda Markowitz, William Wilson, the editor and anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this article. Research for this article was supported in part by the following grants: the University of Alberta Ukrainian Studies grant and Shklar/USF postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.