Cause Lawyering in Transnational Perspective: National Conflict and Human Rights in Israel/Palestine

Abstract

There is an interest among scholars working on cause lawyering to “globalize” the subject by studying professional and political networks that span national boundaries. The globalizing scope of human rights provides a particularly relevant perspective, complementing the more narrowly attenuated focus on the roles and activities of cause lawyers. The subjects of this article are Israeli and Palestinian cause lawyers who have worked in the Israeli military court system in the Occupied Territories. This study adopts a transnational perspective both because the context itself (Israel/Palestine) is composed of relations that span national boundaries (statal and ethnonational) and because it befits a consideration of the international networks of human rights. Following an introductory discussion of transnationalism and a brief background on Israel/Palestine and the military courts, I turn to three aspects of cause lawyering: the political motivations inspiring lawyers to engage in such work; a comparative assessment of the legal and extralegal strategies pursued by lawyers; and the influence of human rights on the politics of lawyering in this context.

Public Lawyers and Private Clients: An Empirical Observation on the Relative Success Rates of Cause Lawyers

“…Generally, there are a number of civil rights organizations who are involved in litigation in Israeli courts on behalf of Palestinians. Some of these organizations do have practices of carefully screening the cases that they take (Hajjar 1996;Dotan 1999). In our study, however, we found only five cases in which the petitioners' lawyers acted on behalf of civil rights organizations during the research period.…”

“…The eight lawyers included in the political group were involved in 100 out of 134 cases in the study. More generally, cause lawyers (and civil rights organizations) are heavily involved in litigation on behalf of Palestinians before Israeli courts (Hajjar 1996;Dotan 1999). The intensive involvement of such lawyers in this field may improve the effectiveness in more than one way: First, it can simply account for professional specialization and expertise in the relevant legal field.…”

“…23. The information on the activity of lawyers in the field of litigation on behalf of Palestinians in Israeli courts was derived both from previous studies (see, e.g., Shamir 1990Shamir , 1991Hajjar 1997;Bisharat 1995;Dotan 1999), and by a number of in-depth interviews that were made in 1996 and 1997 with lawyers, civil rights activists, judges, and government officials who are familiar with this kind of litigation. 24.…”

“…As will be explained below, in this type of litigation the petitioner occasionally has an option to reach an out-of-court settlement with the government under which the army will only seal the house (or some part of it) instead of demolishing it. From the point of view of the radical``transformative'' cause lawyer (i.e., one who seeks to use her legal skills to fight the whole regime of the occupation (Hajjar 1997)), settlements may be an unappealing alternative: On the moral level, they include a concession to the government's authority to employ the contested (and allegedly illegal) measure; from a public relations viewpoint, they draw much less attention both from the media and from other external critics (sealing simply does not look as impressive as demolition when seen on CNN); 15 on the political level, settlements look much less heroic for domestic purposes (i.e., within the different movements fighting against the occupation). The possibility that radical lawyers may have sacrificed individual client interests for the sake of promoting their general political causes was not, however, confined to mere theoretical assessments.…”

Dispossession and empowerment in the ethnography of Palestinians in the occupied territories

“…Kelly (2006), echoing Hajjar (1997), shows how the continuing dominance of military governance in the lives of West Bank Palestinians since Oslo ''means that their relationships with public officials are predominately those of subjects rather than citizens'' (ibid, p. 13). Kelly's book describes six labor disputes in detail, collected during 18 months of fieldwork from the summer of 2000 to the spring of 2002, in a village in the Ramallah District.…”