Focusing on six case studies the aims of this project are to:
- develop a comparative sociology of lawyering perspective which captures the role of lawyers as actors within and beyond the courtroom
- examine the intersection between lawyers and other key civil society, political and legal actors in broader social movements
- explore the contribution of lawyers in shaping local and international understandings of the ‘rule of law’
- interrogate the extent to which transitional contexts may be viewed as ‘exceptional’ from the experiences of settled democracies or whether such heavily politicised contexts merely shine a harsher light on generic socio-legal relations
- chart the relevance (or not) of key themes on the relationship between law, lawyers and political and social change in such contexts in particular legal culture, colonial and post-colonial lawyering and legal pluralism