This chapter examines how cause lawyers in conflicted and authoritarian contexts balance their professional responsibilities with their commitment to a political cause. It seeks to add to the existing literature on lawyers and social movements by offering a new comparative exploration of the relationship between cause lawyering and violent politically motivated movements and individuals. In particular, it considers how lawyers set the boundaries of their ‘professional project’ when managing relations with politically committed clients and collective movements. Using the notion of ‘legitimation work’, this chapter examines the complex, fluid, and contingent understandings of legal professionalism that are developed in such challenging contexts. To better understand the meaning of legal professionalism in such sites, it offers three overlapping ‘ideal types’ of cause lawyers: (a) struggle lawyers, (b) human rights activists, and (c) a ‘pragmatic moral community’. The chapter concludes by re‐examining the legitimating frameworks typically employed by each ideal type of lawyer.

This chapter examines legal boycotts and other styles of resistant engagement in what were often hopeless legal proceedings. Drawing in particular on the literature on resistance, performance, memory studies, and legal consciousness, as well as cause lawyers, we reflect on the role that law plays, not only as an instrument of struggle but also as a resource for envisioning a better society. We begin by exploring the perspectives of cause lawyers who decided to boycott legal proceedings, the relationship between such boycotts and broader social and political struggles, and the intersection between legal boycotts, legitimacy, and law in such settings. The second part of the chapter then examines why and how cause lawyers engaged in acts of legal resistance, including using courts as sites of instrumental and symbolic resistance, and using law as a form of memory work. In the final section, we explore the dialectic between boycott and resistant engagement and argue that, at the core of both strategies, is a ‘stubborn commitment’ to a vision of law and justice as a viable alternative to violence and repression.