While legal practice and scholarship are driven by the use and understanding of complex legal terminology, there has been little effort to incorporate the humanistic scholarship of anthropologists and historians into theoretical or practical accounts of these words and their usages. This paper attempts to historicise and complicate a term that serves as a bridge or meeting point between the legal and the political; sovereignty has been conceptualised since the sixteenth century as both a framing device that produces unity within the state while establishing mutual equality within the interstate order, and as the capacity to make law without being subject to that law. Recent anthropological literature has challenged the personification implicit in political–theoretical definitions of sovereignty, arguing instead for a theory of sovereignty that can be applied to ‘complicated’, post-colonial contexts, where legal orders are plural or overlapping and the state is weak or non-existent. What such critiques cannot explain, however, is how the concept of the ‘sovereign state’ became so central to political discourse on a global scale. This paper draws upon legal historical case-studies concerned with the production of the colonial or post-colonial state or the deployment of ‘sovereignty’ as a justificatory concept in colonial settings. In doing so, this paper argues for understanding sovereignty both as a practice across time and space that organises legal institutions and as a justificatory strategy in the intellectual and social history of those institutions, an approach that allows scholars to draw upon the insights of political theorists, anthropologists and historians. While primarily intended to instigate a broader interdisciplinary conversation, this paper also suggests a preliminary conclusion: sovereignty has historically been deployed as a means of including that which cannot be considered the same, mediating the colonial tension between ‘otherness’ and legal homogeneity.

To paraphrase Barack Obama, cause lawyers aren’t supposed to make any money: ‘their poverty is proof of their integrity’ (Obama, 2007, p. 135). Integrity and its insignia are, of course, sought-after signifiers not only in the field of community organising that Obama was describing, but in all professions, not least that of cause lawyers that is the focus of this book. The Cultural Lives of Cause Lawyers is the fifth in a series of essays edited by Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold on the activities of cause lawyers. Previous collections set the scene for the nature and aims of cause lawyering, analysing their professional and political commitments in theory and in practice, and their relationship to the state and to social movements in a global era. It is a series that almost single-handedly, quickly and efficiently helped define, as well as develop, this exciting new field.