<i>Lawyers in Conflict and Transition</i> By KieranMcEvoy, LouiseMallinder, and AnnaBryson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, 440 pp., £85.00
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.032 | 0.014 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".