National and international lawyers are ubiquitous in transitional political negotiations. However, their role in advancing or stalling negotiations, or in advocating or resisting progressive change, is generally carried out behind closed doors. This chapter explores when and how lawyers living and working within repressive, conflicted, and transitional states influence the content of transitional political agreements. It draws on twenty-five interviews with lawyers who participated directly in negotiations and other informed commentators in our case study sites. Combining this empirical data with literature on lawyers as negotiators, the sociology of the legal profession, and critical international legal theory, the chapter explores the factors that shape relationships between lawyers and the political leadership in negotiations. The chapter further critically analyses the extent to which lawyers’ negotiating styles and legal skills can advance or inhibit the reaching of an agreement. The final section explores the discretion and capacity of lawyer-negotiators for legal imagination in crafting transitional futures. We find that lawyer-negotiations often have to grapple with reconciling their role as legal technicians with the ethical and political challenges of advising on law’s content at times when the law itself is indeterminate or subject to negotiation.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how, after 2000, ZANU-PF extended its political control over the judiciary by staffing its institutions with political appointees. Within the attorney general’s office, such political interference ran from the attorney general himself down to prosecutors working on ZANU-PF’s ‘instructions’. It argues, however, that when we look at the working conditions in the Attorney General’s office more closely, the fragmented hegemony of law within the Zimbabwean state becomes evident. ZANU-PF-instructed prosecutors – the ‘good boys’ – who were willing to set aside their professional conduct to toe the party political line, sat side by side with ‘rebel’ prosecutors, individuals who conducted themselves impartially and did their job ‘professionally’ in an effort to safeguard ‘substantive justice’. In its attempts to exert political control over the attorney general’s office, the ZANU-PF-led government had to contend with historical debates over state professionalism, which rooted law’s legitimacy in legal institutions’ capacity to deliver justice, and tied state authority to the protection of this capacity. In their performances, ‘rebel’ prosecutors positioned themselves as actors within a wider community of judicial officials, human rights lawyers, activists and citizens that shared this consciousness of the value of professionalism.

Thailand’s so-called 'judicial crisis' of 1991-92 centred on the controversial figure of Pramarn Chansue, and his tussles with the appointed government of Anand Panyarachun following the 1991 military coup. The then justice minister stood accused of political interference in the appointment of senior judges, in a pivotal episode in the recent history of the Thai judiciary. Pramarn eventually emerged triumphant from the crisis and became a very powerful supreme court president thereafter, but there were numerous sub-plots involved (including a dramatic attempted murder case featuring a famous architect), and the debacle led directly to the separation of the Office of the Judiciary from the Ministry of Justice a few years later. The chapter will use Thai language and interview sources to examine and analyse an episode that was hugely important, but has scarcely been dealt with academically by either Thai or international scholars.