The Lawyers and Declining Democracy (LADD) project brings together scholars studying the role of lawyers in resisting authoritarianism in countries with backsliding democracies. In 2024, the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession hosted many LADD researchers at Do Legal Professions Resist Authoritarianism?, and in early 2025, the group hosted a symposium at Indiana University Bloomington, Lawyers as Agents for Change in Countries Facing Distress, to convene some of the latest research on the topic; the Indiana event will result in a special symposium issue of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies.
In this interview, project leader Kathryn Hendley, Theodore W. Brazeau Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, explains LADD’s goals, offers examples from her particular area of expertise in Russia, and lays out why comparative work like LADD is so critical in this moment.
Why focus on the lawyers? Why do the lawyers matter when studying authoritarianism or backsliding democracies?
Many of us who work on authoritarian countries are frustrated with the assumption that lawyers are the center of the world. That’s a very U.S. centric view—that lawyers are essential for democracy. Many of us who work in other countries with different political traditions and different legal cultures see that lawyers don’t really matter at all in other contexts. In countries where that’s the case, we should ask: What is the role of lawyers? How do they facilitate authoritarianism in its infancy and then resist or enable entrenched authoritarianism? How do you deal with that as a lawyer, in situations where you don’t actually have that much power? How do you deal with it in countries where lawyers do have a platform and power?
Do you expect lawyers to step up, or do they have a place to step up in that society?
Kathryn Hendley, professor of law and political science, University of Wisconsin-Madison
When you dig into these issues deeper and in a comparative manner, it forces you to confront assumptions about the ways lawyers operate and resist. For instance, people naturally assume that one of the reasons that lawyers are reticent in Russia is out of fear. Fear of repercussions may be a piece of it, but just as relevant are the expectations that society places on lawyers and that lawyers place on themselves. In many authoritarian settings, lawyers have been socialized to see themselves as technicians, not as actors who can reform society’s legal or political systems.
This brings us back to the question, Do lawyers matter in these contexts? Do you expect lawyers to step up, or do they have a place to step up in that society? We also need to investigate: What do lawyers expect from themselves? How are they socialized in law faculties or professional associations to think about themselves? How are they regarded in society, and do they have power within the state?
Bob Nelson and Laura Beth Nielsen wrote a fascinating article on corporate lawyers. One of the questions they explore is how lawyers think of themselves—either as technicians or as advisers. This identity affects how you teach people to be lawyers, and its resonance is not limited to the realm of corporate lawyers. Are clients asking lawyers purely legal questions (and thus viewing lawyers as technicians who know the law)? Or are they asking them to help make wise decisions (and thus seeing lawyers as wise counselors)? What is the job of the lawyer? When we look at countries where lawyers think of themselves more as technicians, it makes sense that you might not see lawyers as a key part of a ground-swelling resistance to authoritarianism. In the United States, we are more self-aggrandizing. But doing this comparative work helps you understand the role of lawyers across these contexts better.
One aspect of the movement we hope to examine more is the facilitators or enablers of authoritarianism—often government folks—and why they engage the way they do. But it’s obviously harder to talk to those folks to ask them about their trajectory and motivations.
You’re a Russia expert. What’s the state of play with respect to lawyers there and how does the legal profession engage with the government?
There’s no simple answer to this question for Russia and probably not for most other countries that are inching toward authoritarianism or have already achieved that status, like Russia. Russia’s legal profession is institutionally divided—members of the traditional specialties identify with their specialties rather than as lawyers. Those who work for the state, whether as prosecutors, investigators, or staff lawyers in the sprawling bureaucracy, invariably facilitate Putin’s policies. By contrast, the smaller group of lawyers who opt to join the bar association (called advokaty) and who enjoy a monopoly over representing criminal defendants are more likely to resist. A minority of these advokaty do so actively by filing lawsuits to challenge the constitutionality of the rash of repressive laws passed in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. These human rights defenders also resist by questioning the constitutionality of their clients’ arrests for protesting the invasion. Other lawyers in private practice, both members of the bar and those who opt not to join, prefer to sit on the sidelines.
How does this project try to account for the paradox of lawyers as both resistors and enablers of democratic backsliding or authoritarianism?
There are really three streams of lawyers: those who resist (often human rights defense lawyers or activists), those who enable or facilitate (government lawyers or prosecutors and sometimes judges), and last, the people who are sitting on the sidelines. Maybe this last group are corporate lawyers or transactional lawyers, but they’re doing legal work in a regime that is backsliding or authoritarian and not engaging. Is that enabling? Or is it something else? In different countries, there’s going to be a different set of explanations as to why people jump in, why they don’t jump in, why they sit on the sidelines, and how that changes over time. We are learning from each other as scholars about the persecution of lawyers across contexts and how that detracts from or motivates lawyers in either direction.
In Russia, which is my particular area of direct research, there are ways that one can resist very publicly in limited contexts without fear of persecution. There’s a Russian tradition that lawyers can say whatever they want in court without reproach—some readers may be familiar with the speeches that famous dissidents like Alexei Navalny or Vladimir Kara-Murza gave as they were being sentenced. But now we’re starting to see that they are going after the lawyers in a way that feels very familiar to those who know the work of Sida Liu and Terence Halliday in their great book on Chinese defense lawyers. Liu and Halliday talk about how the state will attack the lawyers by claiming that the lawyers are slandering the state simply by arguing the truth—that their clients have been tortured. For instance, Russia has prosecuted and convicted Navalny’s lawyers on the grounds that they used their status as lawyers to enable and commit extremist crimes. This project allows us to see these patterns in authoritarian playbooks. On the other side, it is interesting to see how lawyers are trying to push back by walking the narrow line of defending their clients without necessarily attacking the regime.
Many think that Russia is a completely lawless place. But in reality Russia is a combination of ignoring the law when the regime wants to and then being extraordinarily positivistic in more mundane settings.
Kathryn Hendley
Resistance in Russia has also changed as the state’s tactics have changed. There are classic human rights defenders who are still arguing that their clients did not violate the Constitution; that it allows for freedom of assembly in situations where they arranged protests. But now you start to see resistance as procedural. Lawyers are finding ways to acquit their clients by attacking the paperwork rather than arguing for human rights. They say, “When you engaged in this investigation, you needed do X, Y, and Z, and you didn’t do X. That box is not checked.”
Many think that Russia is a completely lawless place. But in reality Russia is a combination of ignoring the law when the regime wants to and then being extraordinarily positivistic in more mundane settings. This is the argument of my book, Everyday Law in Russia. Identifying where police or investigators did not check the right series of boxes is a way of freeing clients. You might not get high-level dissidents acquitted in this way, but a low-level person who is just protesting, sometimes their case will be returned for further investigation, and that’s a polite way of dismissing a case in a country like Russia. Identifying people like this who are engaging in defense but might not be traditional human rights lawyers shows the nuance of how lawyers engage with government power. This is where it’s great to be a technician. Because they know these codes backward and forward, they can pick up on these small errors that big-picture people might miss. That’s not unique to Russia. It’s something we’re seeing in lots of countries, and it’s something that we haven’t paid enough attention to.
What strategies are lawyers using to prevent democratic backsliding? What about enabling it?
It depends on what your institutional structure is. Countries with constitutional courts can attack laws that are overbroad or vague as unconstitutional. In authoritarian political systems, lawyers rarely prevail in such cases. Countries that have access to supranational courts can try to get to that court, recognizing that the domestic courts may not be that helpful. Those kinds of results rarely lead to fundamental changes domestically, though they can be helpful on the international stage, but that too can be a strategy. We know from the Cold War period that chipping away at a country’s international reputation, especially in the human rights area, can yield results over the long term.
Another often-overlooked issue is whether or not there is any sort of political opposition. In the constitutional court setting, for instance, if you have no opposition, then nobody in the legislature is ever going to bring an action challenging a law. In Russia, during the ’90s, the constitutional court was quite active. They went after Yeltsin for allegedly overstepping his constitutional role during the war in Chechnya. Today, no legislator in Russia would ever do such a thing. The constitutional court has not become a dead letter because they do engage in a lot of trimming back of existing legislation, but they never do anything that’s going to raise the hackles of the Kremlin.
In an authoritarian system, you can have multiple stories about law.
Kathryn Hendley
Overall, this ties back to this argument that I’ve long been making about how in an authoritarian system, you can have multiple stories about law. This builds on the work of Ernst Fraenkel, who wrote about Nazi Germany, and Robert Sharlet, who applied this framework to the Soviet Union under Stalin. It helps us make sense of how you can have this very positivistic story where people are obeying the law, and the courts are enforcing it in excruciating detail in mundane cases. But then of course, in political cases, not so much.
In terms of enabling or facilitating authoritarianism, we have to look at government lawyering—and this type of lawyering challenges our understanding of government lawyering. Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy suggests that a civil service should be apolitical. And in the United States, we want to live up to this ideal. We’d like to think that the civil service is simply living up to the Constitution. Now, however, we’re seeing that civil servants are being asked to adopt the policy agenda of whoever is running the government. In authoritarian places like Russia and China, that just goes without saying. It would be very unusual for a lawyer to have a crisis of conscience there the way we have seen it in the United States in the past few weeks. This goes back to the whole idea of lawyers as technicians. A lawyer-technician is going to do what their boss says that they’re supposed to do.
The other part of exploring how lawyers are facilitating or resisting democratic backsliding that is currently coming up in the U.S. context is the culture of resignations. Is resigning a strategy of resistance? In a country like the United Kingdom, resigning seems to be a way of life; lawyers and politicians are always making these big political points by resigning and standing on their moral principles. It has not been that common in the United States until recently. During Trump’s first term, some government lawyers asked, “Should I stay and try to figure out how to take this policy that I think is problematic and bring it into constitutional constraints, or should I walk away?” That’s a big debate that has been revived in Trump’s second term.
I wonder whether this idea that my role as a lawyer is to be a technician makes it easier to not resist. One can say: “I’m not here to make moral judgments. I’m not here to say whether or not you should do this or not. I’m just here to follow through on what the agenda is.” Of course, we all think that there should be limits on what the agenda is. But that socialization to think of yourself as a technician can help a lawyer be more of a facilitator of democratic backsliding.
How do professional organizations either aid or abet lawyers in these contexts of enabling and resisting?
The LADD project is just beginning to open up this question. In Egypt, for instance, it’s not a constant story—the power and allegiances of the lawyers’ association wane and grow over time. Looking comparatively forces you to confront a lot of assumptions. We assume there must be something equivalent to the American Bar Association or state bars everywhere. But there’s not. In most countries, the people that we would think of as the facilitators of declining democracy—prosecutors, for instance—would not be part of their umbrella bar association. In Russia, for instance, the equivalent bar association is mostly composed of private lawyers.
As political systems grow more repressive, we see that bar associations tend to be less willing to get out in front of things.
Kathryn Hendley
The question for us is the extent to which the state has taken over the regulation of that bar association—it seems to have happened in China. Different groups have different levels of independence. As political systems grow more repressive, we see that bar associations tend to be less willing to get out in front of things. They are less willing to defend people.
Is there a particular instance of resistance that gives you hope against this world’s authoritarian turn?
The fact that there is this group, and it’s a relatively small group, of resistors in Russia—a couple hundred lawyers who won’t allow themselves to be stopped. Most of them are no longer in Russia anymore, but they’re still working to help people. There are NGOs, such as OVD-Info, that are keeping track of the number of arrests and recruiting nontraditional lawyers to join them. These lawyers will come into cases where people have been arrested for protesting, which is considered an administrative, not a criminal offense, and work with them. It’s not going to turn everything around over night, but the fact that they’re able to bring nontraditional lawyers in on the cause is valuable—and it’s something.
What is next for LADD? What countries do you hope to add?
Many of those affiliated with LADD will be at the annual meetings of the Law and Society Association. We plan to reconnect there. We’re also hopeful that we’ll be able to hold another symposium during the coming academic year—we’re waiting to learn about funding. In our future events, we’ll seek to expand our global coverage. It’s sad to think about how many countries in which the lawyers are experiencing the challenges that animate our project. These include Hungary, Belarus, and Turkey, along with many Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American countries, such as Vietnam, Philippines, Israel, Iraq, El Salvador, Colombia, just to name a few.
Kathryn Hendley is the Theodore W. Brazeau Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her current research explores the role of lawyers in Russia. She is leading a collaborative project on Lawyers and Democratic Decline (LADD). LADD brings together scholars who are studying how lawyers in countries experiencing democratic decline or full-fledged authoritarianism are coping. It includes scholars working on lawyers in Russia, China, Poland, Brazil, and the United States.
