ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 12 No. 5 (May 2002) pp. 229-232.
CAUSE LAWYERING AND THE STATE IN A GLOBAL ERA by Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold (Editors). New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001. 417 pp. Cloth $45.00. ISBN: 0-19-514116-4. Paper $19.95. ISBN: 0-19-514117-2.
Reviewed by James C. Foster, Department of Political Science, Oregon State University.
Wassily Kandinsky's "Luminosity" graces the cover of the paperback edition of CAUSE LAWYERING AND THE
STATE IN A GLOBAL ERA. In "Colour
Theory," the name of the class he taught at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky conceptualized the artist's vocation in
musical and spiritual terms. "Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with
many strings .. The artist, i.e. the hand that plays, touching one key after another purposively, to cause vibrations
in the soul" (quoted in Birren 1965: 89). Kandinsky embraced a sensibility that may be prosaically termed
post-modern: "Absolute means do not exist in painting; its means are relative only" (quoted in Becks-Malorney
1999: 97).
Kandinsky's stunning image also appears on the home page of The Comparative Law and Society Studies Center (CLASS)
at the University of Washington. This symmetry may be coincidental, but I think not. Both the collection edited
by Sarat and Scheingold (long-term collaborators, the latter who is Emeritus at the University of Washington) and
CLASS exist at the cutting edge of socio-legal studies. CAUSE LAWYERING AND THE STATE IN A GLOBAL ERA is a companion
to Sarat and Scheingold's previous CAUSE LAWYERING: POLITICAL COMMITMENTS AND PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES. Like
their earlier volume, epistemologically the book under review rejects "absolute means." In the earlier
collection, Sarat and Scheingold insist that, "providing a
single, cross-culturally valid definition of the concept [of cause lawyering] is impossible" (Sarat and Scheingold
1998: 5). CAUSE LAWYERING AND THE STATE IN A GLOBAL ERA carries this sensibility further, viewing its subject
through the lens of what might metaphorically be termed "quantum physics" (See Tribe 1989), but more
on this below.
CAUSE LAWYERING AND THE STATE IN A GLOBAL ERA contains thirteen multihued studies between bookends made up of an
introductory essay by Sarat and Scheingold, and a Postscript by Scheingold. The studies are divided into three
parts.
Part I focuses on Global Developments/ Local Contests: New Opportunities/New Challenges. The four studies here
explore how global factors shape political lawyering in specific settings: Ghana, Israel/Palestine, Texas (on behalf
of Costa Rican nationals seeking monetary damages), and the U. S. (on behalf of Salvadorians seeking entry). The
specific transnational dynamics at play are "economic development" policies mandated by the United States
and agencies like the International Monetary Fund (Lucie White
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on Ghana), the Oslo Accords (Lisa Hajjar on Israel/Palestine), two multinational corporations (Anne Bloom on Texas),
and cross-border migration (Susan Bibler Coutin on Salvadorians).
Part II focuses on Globalization and State Transformation: Patterns of Conflict and Cooperation between Cause Lawyers
and the State. The six essays here address the ways in which cause lawyers interact with the convergence between
transnational economic and national political trends in four particular national formations. In England, Andrew
Boon argues, "a shrinking of the public sector, limitations of public spending, and a propaganda war against
dependency on the state" (p. 18) pitted cause lawyering against the state, transforming the former. Writing
on South Africa, Heinz Klug investigates how the successful struggle to end apartheid changed the tactics that
cause lawyers employed to pursue the goal of vindicating property rights for blacks. Two studies situated in Israel
shed light on how cause lawyers
must be tactically nimble. Both Jewish lawyers seeking to protect rights of Palestinians living in the Occupied
Territories, and lawyers fighting ethnic discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel wanting to settle in an
Israeli community were obliged to innovate. The former, Yoav Dotan finds, collaborate with government lawyers
to accommodate shared Israeli state security concerns, on the one hand, with a shared commitment to the rule of
law. The latter, Ronen Shamir and Neta Ziv discover, colluded with Uri Davis, a Jewish person, in a ruse to purchase
land in Katsir without revealing that the actual purchaser was Fat'hi Mahamid, a plan that both imaginatively used
state-sanctioned procedures and put the exclusionist majority on the defensive in Israeli courts. Death penalty
opponents and
disability rights advocates in the United States similarly have formed novel alliances. Austin Sarat explains
how the Death penalty bar and the American Bar Association (ABA) found uneasy common ground, manifest in the ABA's
1997 call for a moratorium on executions. Neta Ziv describes how disability cause
lawyering became "legislative cause lawyering," requiring advocates to mediate between being participating
in movement politics and being state actors during congressional debate and passage of the Americans with Disability
Act.
Part III focuses on The Globalization of Cause Lawyering. Three of the four essays here are case studies about
the "decentering" (p. 23) of cause lawyering in our time. Latin America and Israel are the nominal venues
where political lawyering has undergone important changes amidst transnational force fields. Stephen Meili scrutinizes
the creation of "transnational advocacy networks" in "postauthoritarian Latin America" (p.
308). Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth investigate the complex interactions of biographical, cultural, institutional,
and social factors out of which international "human rights as an alternative political strategy" was
"constructed" in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. Noga Morag-Levine's essay documents how "the politics
of imported rights" altered an Israeli "Cause Lawyering Organization" (p. 334), specifically the
Israel Union for Environmental Defense, patterned after the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Scheingold's Postscript, which closes Part III as well as the book under review, is a tour de force. For those
familiar with the particular blend of analytical precision, skill at synthesis, and reasoned political progressivism
he has displayed throughout his career, this essay is vintage Scheingold.
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For those who are not, "Cause Lawyering and Democracy in Transnational Perspective" is an excellent introduction.
Noting that cause lawyering emerges from the proceeding essays as "both contingent and coherent," Scheingold
sets as his task "to construct a synthesis that manages to identify the elements of coherence while at the
same time honoring diversity and contingency" (p. 383). He succeeds admirably. He observes that although
cause lawyering is practiced "across multiple and mutable settings ... cause lawyering and democracy are inextricably
and productively related" (p. 384). Thus, the major substantive conclusion of his essay--and this book--is
that cause lawyering and legal-liberal forms of democracy are "homologous." He writes: "This homology
can be traced to state structures, to the culture of
the legal profession, and to the interaction between them" (p. 399; see Scheingold 1999). This conclusion,
likely unsurprising to readers of THE LAW AND POLITICS BOOK REVIEW, is thoroughly grounded in this and its companion
volume. That contribution is worth the price of admission.
Still, it is what I would term Sarat and Scheingold's epistemological stance that marks this book as a seminal
contribution. One might say that CAUSE LAWYERING AND THE STATE IN A GLOBAL ERA contributes to an emergent "Copenhagen
Interpretation" of socio-legal studies. (With my tongue planted
firmly in my cheek, and stifling a smirk, I nevertheless cannot resist the temptation to suggest that Sarat and
Scheingold might be the socio-legal analogues of Heisenberg and Bohr. I'll leave it to the reader to sort out
which is which!) Their figures of speech are pervaded with quantum metaphors: cause lawyering is a "moving
target" "in constant transition"; a "fluidity of boundaries" distinguishes cause lawyering
from, and "connects it to, conventional lawyering"; [t]he already complicated world of cause lawyering
is further complicated by the WEBS OF POSSIBILITIES and barriers associated with contemporary multiplication of
legal spaces at both national and transnational levels" (emphasis added, p. 13). According to their interpretation,
"complexity, contingency, and ambiguity" inherently "hovers over the concept of cause lawyering"
(n. 8, p. 402). They posit, "The strategic calculations made by cause lawyers are inevitably composed from
a
FLUID, and UNPREDICTABLE, amalgam of their own values (or ideological commitments), their interests (in terms of
career objectives), and their political opportunities (in terms of the state structures that they confront)"
(emphasis added, p. 393). With Kandinsky, Sarat and Scheingold apprehend that absolute means do not exist.
REFERENCES:
Becks-Malorney, Ulricke. 1999. WASSILY KANDINSKY, 1866-1944: THE JOURNEY TO ABSTRACTION. K"ln, Germany: Taschen.
Birren, Faber. 1965. HISTORY OF COLOR IN PAINTING. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Sarat, Austin and Stuart Scheingold, ed. 1998. CAUSE LAWYERING: POLITICAL COMMITMENTS AND PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Scheingold, Stuart A. 1999. "Taking Weber Seriously: Lawyers, Politics, and the Liberal State," LAW AND
SOCIAL INQUIRY. 24: 1061-81.
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Tribe, Laurence H. 1989. "The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics,"
HARVARD LAW REVIEW 103: 1-39.
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Copyright 2002 by the author, James C. Foster.