The Legal Complex and Autocratization: Resistance, Cooperation, and Repair

Around the globe today, autocrats manipulate the law to undermine democracy from within. This process of “autocratic legalism” (Scheppele 2018) involves challenges to constitutional principles, including the curbing and capturing of courts. While important literature analyzes the responses of judges to authoritarianism, there has been less focus on the roles of other members of the “legal complex” –prosecutors, bar associations, practicing lawyers, and legal academics (Halliday, Karpik and Feeley 2007)– in accelerating, braking, or neutralizing autocratization. This gap in the literature raises critical questions: What explains why different legal professionals resist or advance authoritarianism, separately or in coordination? Does professional legal training promote cross-institutional cooperation amid threats to the rule of law? What strategies do autocrats employ to co-opt actors within the legal complex and how does this impact pathways to authoritarianism? When and how do members of the legal complex repair damaged institutions and legal norms after authoritarianism?

To address these questions, our workshop will leverage the diverse disciplinary and geographic expertise of scholars studying jurisdictions that have a recent experience with autocratization in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. We begin with a discussion on how to conceptualize three categories of judicial and legal responses to authoritarianism: resistance, cooperation, and repair. From there, participants delve into how various actors in the legal complex respond to, or even facilitate, autocratization processes, highlighting the interplay among judges and prosecutors. On the second day, the focus shifts to the role of lawyers and the socio-professional dynamics that shape their choices. We then turn our attention to judicial capture, strategies of resistance, and the role of public opinion in either supporting or challenging authoritarianism.

This workshop will set in motion the first global network of socio-legal scholars working on these issues of growing real-world importance. It engages concepts and ideas developed by Halliday, Karpik, and Feeley’s influential edited 2007 volume, published by Oñati/Hart, proposing a theoretical link between legal professionals and political liberalism. At a time when liberal legalism faces significant threats around the world, and processes of autocratization target actors across the legal complex, our workshop will offer fresh insights on this theoretical proposition.

In addition to testing the validity and limits of Halliday, Karpik, and Feeley’s framework, ur interdisciplinary workshop makes three original contributions to our understanding of the sociological foundations of law-based politics:

1. By situating judges within the broader legal complex to illuminate interconnections and tensions between various legal professionals and authoritarian actors, it provides a new lens through which to study the autocratic legal toolkit and the ways legal agents cooperate in and enable authoritarianism;
2. It provides new comparative insights into how relationships within and beyond the legal complex shape the modes and strategies of law-based resistance to authoritarianism;
3. As the global consensus around liberal constitutional democracy weakens, it highlights how legal actors might repair and reform legal norms and institutions following authoritarian attacks.