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The Lawyers’ Movement in Pakistan: how legal actors mobilise in a hybrid regime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2023

Maryam S. Khan
Maryam S. Khan*
Affiliation:
Research Fellow, Institute of Development & Economic Alternatives (IDEAS), Lahore, Pakistan
*
Email: Maryam.khan@ideaspak.org
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Abstract

Drawing primarily from qualitative interviews conducted between 2017 and 2018, this empirical study tells a granular story of how legal actors mobilised during the Lawyers’ Movement in Pakistan (2007–2009) from the perspective of lawyer-leaders who organised, steered and sustained support for the Movement through rapidly shifting political conditions. By underscoring the contribution of lawyer-leaders in empowering judges, the article seeks both to displace uncritical assumptions and arguments about courts as the nucleus of legal mobilisation in Pakistan, and to highlight the crucial role of political parties in the restoration of the judiciary against the backdrop of disintegrating lawyer-judge coalitions. Given Pakistan’s political context of a ‘hybrid regime’, the article reflects on the unsuitability of the ‘legal complex’ theory of ‘political liberalism’ for analysing and understanding the Movement, and locates it instead in the literature on legal mobilisation in authoritarian regimes.

Keywords

legal mobilisationsocio-legal studieslegal complexlaw and social movementshybrid regimepost-colonial South AsiaLawyers’ Movement
Type
Special Issue Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 19 , Special Issue 3: ‘Law in Context’ in Post-Colonial South Asia , September 2023 , pp. 315 - 333
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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