Chapter 4 - Gender and Cause Lawyering in Conflicted, Authoritarian, and Transitional Societies

Summary

Support for a common cause typically engenders a high degree of collegiality amongst lawyers but, even when united in pursuit of a political goal, closer examination tends to reveal internal divisions along the familiar fault-lines of race, ethnicity, class, age, and gender. Reflecting on what Jessie Bernard refers to as the ‘stag effect’ in much of the existing literature on cause lawyers – a disproportionate focus on the activities of men and ‘masculine’ causes – this chapter places a particular spotlight on gender. It draws mainly (though not exclusively) on interviews with female lawyers to explore personal motivation; paradoxical opportunities; the gendered consequences associated with ‘taking on’ legal work; how gender intersects with other variables for women lawyers in such contexts; and the ways in which gender equality is imagined and sometimes manipulated by the state during periods of conflict, authoritarianism and transition. In the final section, we reflect on how the women lawyers we interviewed asserted their agency in the face of significant structural and gendered constraints.