The Legal Complex and Struggles for Political Liberalism
Author: Terence Halliday
Understanding the foundations of political liberalism has become one of most critical issues of the past fifteen years. Countries that are not democracies or that are in transition face global pressures to build moderate states via independent, competent judiciaries, to permit the opening of civil society, and to institute and protect core rights against state oppression.
This project seeks to understand the impact of the legal complex (configurations of lawyers, judges, legal academics) on advances towards or retreats from political liberalism over recent decades. A prior project funded by NSF (Halliday and Karpik, Lawyers and the Rise of Political Liberalism, Oxford) established that, in certain circumstances, lawyers played a notable role in the emergence of founding democracies in the modern era (e.g., Britain, France, United States), although lawyers are limited liberals.
This project aims for a substantial advance beyond these historical findings by examining their salience to contemporary political transitions; by broadening the scope of countries to East Asia, Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America; by juxtaposing mature democracies with new democracies, transitional regimes, and illiberal regimes; and by drawing the dynamics of lawyers, judges, and legal academics into the same explanatory frame.
The first phase of this project has produced a new book, Fighting for Political Freedom, Hart Publishing, in December, 2007, which shows the impact of the legal complex on the politics of East Asia, Middle East, Latin America, and some European countries.
The second phase of this project studies countries in South Asia, Africa and South East Asia, which obtained independence from Britain after World War II.
The third phase studies countries where political liberalism has been long established but is now under threat, where basic legal freedoms are in retreat.
These projects seek to advance three bodies of scholarship: (1) by producing a new generation of scholarship on the politics of lawyers, now understood to be integral in the expansion of civil, economic, social and political rights; (2) by bringing into constructive engagement two lines of scholarship—the legal profession and political jurisprudence—that usually proceed independently; and (3) by opening up a broader conversation between scholars on democratization and those on law and politics.