<i>Lawyers in Conflict and Transition</i> By KieranMcEvoy, LouiseMallinder, and AnnaBryson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, 440 pp., £85.00

Lawyers in Conflict and Transition is an invaluable study of how 'lawyers as "real people" . . .respond to the challenges of conflict, authoritarianism, and transition' (pp. 1, 298).Its main contribution to a growing literature on 'cause lawyering' lies in the careful analysis of material from 131 interviews with mostly lawyers, but also some judges and academics, from six jurisdictions (Cambodia, Chile, Israel, Palestine, South Africa, and Tunisia), all of which are 'pressurised environments wherein the rule of law is undermined and subverted' (p.298).I will explain why, while much of the analysis may seem to suggest deep pessimism about the prospects for cause lawyering, the book nevertheless contains an optimistic message.The authors -Kieran McEvoy, Louise Mallinder, and Anna Bryson -tell the reader at the outset that they are 'human rights activists who have for many years been directly involved in trying to find lawful and human-rights-compliant solutions to deal with the legacy of . . .[the] conflict' in the 'complex political' society in which they all work and live: Northern Ireland (p.3).They include within their scope lawyers whose 'cause' is on the right of the political spectrum, as well as a whole chapter on the neglected role of government lawyers.However, for the most part, they study cause lawyers on the liberal-left side of the political spectrum -that is, those who are either devoted to the pursuit of human rights for their own sake, or take up that pursuit because they see it as useful to advance the political cause that is their primary loyalty: the overthrow of some repressive and unjust regime.However, the pursuit of justice -the cause of both kinds of lawyers -is not an explicit theme of the book since the authors' methodology is a 'comparative sociology of lawyering perspective' (p.298).In fact, if every aspirant cause lawyer were to read this book, as every such person most definitely should, the result could be one that the authors surely could not intend: a world without cause lawyers.For aspirant cause lawyers would learn that their career would be for the most part one of helping to legitimate the illegitimate -a morally fraught, perhaps even morally tainted, endeavour, in which they might hope at best to 'at times' be 'key to nudging politics and politicians towards more rule-of-law-compliant compromises and accommodations' (p.304).Moreover, against that hope, they would have to weigh the fact that while, as the authors note,

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