Israel has since 1967 administered the West Bank and Gaza Strip through highly legalistic and strongly repressive military governments. Has advocacy in Israeli courts on behalf of Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Ship has legitimated, and thus helped to perpetuate, ongoing Israeli military occupation of those regions? By examining legitimation in lawyering under lsraeli occupation, insight can be gained into the factors and their relative weights that lawyers facing harsh or repressive regimes must consider in balancing the costs and benefits of litigation to serve a social or political opposition movement. The author concludes that the benefits outweigh the legitimating effects of lawyers' work and that, on balance, Palestinians' election to seek representation in Israeli courts, and lawyers' choice to assist them, has been justified.

This mticle examines whether anti-apartheid lawyering might have legitimized the South Afncan legal system by asking what black South Ahcans actually thought of that system. Perhaps surprisingly, blrcks, and in particular African, appear to have accorded the legal system a measure of legitimacy despite the oppression they often suffered at its hands. Three paradigms of African opinion are offered to help us understand the complex African response to the legal system: the conservatives, forbearing, mutely concerned with such issues as order and security, and perhaps disposed to be deferential to institutions of white authority; the speakers, fueled by faith in the truth or power of their speech, and welcoming the opportunity to be heard that courts could povide; and the activists, adamantly detennined to bnng down apartheid, and judgrng institutions and people by their conhibution to that goal. For men and women thinking in these ways, anti-apartheid lawyering probably did contribute to legitimizing the legal system and that system's ideals. But this partial legitimation of the legal system is, in the end, no came for regret; instead, it may have helped the new South Africa begin building a nation governed by law.

Throughout the world, judges are often asked to implement the repressive measures of authoritarian rulers. Which conception of legal interpretation and judicial role, if any, make judges more likely to resist such pressures? That question, central to Anglo-American jurisprudence since the Hart-Fuller debate, is addressed by examining recent military rule in Argentina and Brazil. In Argentina, judges were sympathetic to military rule and so criticized its “excesses” in the jurisprudential terms favored by the juntas: positivism and legal realism. Brazilian judges, by contrast, were largely unsympathetic to military rule, and so couched their criticism in terms of natural law, in order to raise larger questions and reach a broader public. Empirical study of the cases and conceptual analysis of existing theories both reveal that no view of legal interpretation inherently disposes its adherents to either accept or repudiate repressive law. Contingent political circumstances—the rulers' favored form of legal rhetoric, and the degree to which judges accept the need for a period of extra-constitutional rule—determine which legal theory fosters most resistance. But since most authoritarian rulers nominally affirm their constitutional predecessors' positive law and are often unwilling to codify publicly their most repressive policies, strict literalism usually offers the most congenial idiom for judicial resistance to such regimes.

Litigation has not been a significant strategy in Taiwan for challenging injustice due to the use of the Civil Law tradition as a model for the Republic of China legal system and the diminished autonomy of the ROC legal profession and legal system under martial law and authoritarian rule. Individual lawyers, however, were among the leading proponents of reform during Taiwan's recent transition to democratic rule. Furthermore, one of the significant liberalizing reforms ushered in by the democratic transition has been the reform of the ROC legal profession. We examine the contribution of some lawyers to democratization and consider what role the reconstituted ROC legal profession may play in the political economy of Taiwan in the future.

The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 included a double standard in its provisions. While a wife's adultery was sufficient cause to end a marriage, a woman could divorce her husband only if his adultery had been compounded by another matrimonial offense. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923 granted a wife the right to divorce her husband for adultery alone and thus removed the double standard with respect to the grounds for divorce from English statutes. Although the 1923 act was contemporaneous with other reforms extending the legal rights of women, an analysis of the public debates regarding divorce reform indicates that the statute was not based solely on a desire to provide equitable matrimonial relief for husbands and wives. The belief that male adultery contributed to such social problems as prostitution, illegitimacy, and the spread of venereal disease was as significant in the passage of the 1923 act as the demand for equal access to divorce for men and women.

This article is part of a larger study on the history of industrial safety law in the United States, one that places particular emphasis on the development of competing attributions of the causes of industrial injury as that development relates to changes in technology, political economy, and culture. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, long noted as a catalyst for Progressive Era factory reform, worked a change in the legal culture's “common sense” of why and how industrial injuries took place. By focusing on and making tangible causal theories that had been in circulation for some time but never embodied successfully in the law, the Triangle fire destroyed long-standing ideological barriers to factory legislation. It thus played a significant role in laying the epistemological foundation of the modern regulatory state.