Chapter 7 argues that law’s framing of accountability results in an inevitably partial and fractured picture of wrongdoing for historical abuse. The chapter argues that despite a focus on accountability for historical child sexual abuse, non-sexual historical abuses, especially those authorised or ignored by law, struggle to achieve modern-day legal accountability against individuals, institutions, or states. Law’s claim to sovereign authority is unable to comprehensively address historical-structural abuses, which may challenge the legitimacy of the legal order created by states and churches. The chapter considers these challenges in the context of accountability mechanisms, including criminal prosecutions, civil litigation, and the use of canon law.

This contribution investigates the role of legal advisors in lobbying and advocacy work of non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Law is an important tool for NGOs, and many of them employ legal or ‘law and policy’ advisors. These advisors deal with a range of matters, providing strategic advice and legal support for community-based outreach work and engaging in litigation and policy dialogue with government and their agencies. Through a set of expert interviews conducted among legal advisors working in Brussels and Helsinki based NGOs, this contribution sheds light on the hitherto unknown group of legal experts. It is interested in how legal advisors see their own role in lobbyng and advocacy work that NGOs do and how they construct and shape the notion of public interest in their activities, trying to remain faithful to what they see as a “lawyer’s” role. At the same time, the contribution also provides information about new roles that lawyers have in modern societies and the increasing significance of legal expertise in lobbying and advocacy activities.

This chapter engages in a comparative examination of cause lawyering in the prisoners’ rights and animal rights movements. Drawing on the rich literature on cause lawyering and social movements, and on American constitutional law, it discusses the similarities and differences in the possibilities for legal advocacy concerning the rights of incarcerated persons and the treatment of non-human animals. The chapter offers a descriptive account of three areas in which these movements might be studied through a comparative lens – countering invisibility; facilitating moral suasion; and overcoming disenfranchisement. The chapter suggests that these comparisons might lead public interest lawyers working in these respective spaces to share ideas about strategic approaches and potential similarities that might be employed to overcome common barriers to progress. It also explains that this typological model for comparing cause lawyering might be employed by scholars in examining relationships between and among other social movements.

This chapter outlines this book’s contribution toexisting research on the sociology of the legal profession and cause lawyering in particular. It documents how these areas of scholarship have primarily examined the activities of lawyers within democratic states, whereas our focus is on how lawyers as ‘real people’ responded to the professional challenges of practising law in the difficult circumstances of conflict, authoritarianism, and transition. The chapter then provides a detailed account of the methodology and an overview of the empirical data underpinning the study. It concludes with an overview of the remaining chapters, with reference to key themes such as exceptionalism, agency/legitimacy and memory.

Public interest lawyering in South Korea has emerged as a response to inadequate rights protections. During the democratic transition, Lawyers for a Democratic Society (Minbyeon) was the primary network of lawyers who advocated for civil and political rights, especially on behalf of workers, students, and dissidents. In the 1990s, lawyers increasingly worked with nongovernmental organizations to promote social and economic rights in the areas of labor, consumer advocacy, environmental rights, and gender equality. Most recently, a small number of public interest lawyers’ groups formed to focus on the rights of minorities, such as migrants, refugees, people with disabilities, and sexual minorities. Meanwhile, bar associations, law firms, and law schools have sought to promote pro bono activity as a professional ethic. This article examines the emergence of public interest law entities since the early 2000s to identify patterns in institutional development and sustainability, especially in modeling and diversification. These case studies uncover an increasingly institutionalized infrastructure for legal mobilization in Korea.