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Cause Lawyering in Transnational Perspective: National Conflict and Human Rights in Israel/Palestine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Lisa Hajjar
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Abstract

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There is an interest among scholars working on cause lawyering to “globalize” the subject by studying professional and political networks that span national boundaries. The globalizing scope of human rights provides a particularly relevant perspective, complementing the more narrowly attenuated focus on the roles and activities of cause lawyers. The subjects of this article are Israeli and Palestinian cause lawyers who have worked in the Israeli military court system in the Occupied Territories. This study adopts a transnational perspective both because the context itself (Israel/Palestine) is composed of relations that span national boundaries (statal and ethnonational) and because it befits a consideration of the international networks of human rights. Following an introductory discussion of transnationalism and a brief background on Israel/Palestine and the military courts, I turn to three aspects of cause lawyering: the political motivations inspiring lawyers to engage in such work; a comparative assessment of the legal and extralegal strategies pursued by lawyers; and the influence of human rights on the politics of lawyering in this context.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , 1997 , pp. 473 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 1996 Law and Society Association annual meeting (Glasgow, Scotland) and the Working Group for the Comparative Study of the Legal Professions (Peyresq, France). For these opportunities, I would like to thank Austin Sarat, Stuart Scheingold, and William Felstiner. Ronen Shamir and George Bisharat have provided extremely useful counsel and information over the past few years, including comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am very grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and to Joe Stork and Bashar Tarabieh for insightful criticism and suggestions. Field research was supported by grants from the American Association of University Women, the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, the Institute for Intercultural Studies, and The American University, Washington, DC.

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