Legal Resistance under Authoritarianism

Yan-ho Lai, PhD, is a research fellow at the Center for Asian Law, Georgetown University Law Center. He studies and writes on law and society, judicial politics, human rights and national security in hybrid and authoritarian regimes. Legal Resistance Under Authoritarianism is his third book and first research monograph.

"Excavating how people on the ground – civil society, the legal profession, social movements – are impelled by convictions relating to sovereignty, democracy, and the rule of law, Lai’s rigorously researched, and theoretically innovative study breaks new ground for understanding the complexities of law and authoritarianism. Grounded in the fraught context of post-handover Hong Kong, Lai’s attention to the linkages of the economy, law, peoples, and politics, illuminates forms of authoritarian legality urgently relevant to our need to understand China in today’s world. Beyond China and Hong Kong, this book interrogates pervasive and transnational discourses of national security, instructing readers on how to resist authoritarianism everywhere."– Jothie Rajah, Research Professor, American Bar Foundation "The struggle for the rule of law by Hong Kong lawyers is one of the great episodes in modern times of lawyer mobilization on behalf of liberal legal orders. Lai’s extensive research, and his illuminating analyses of mechanisms and discourses in China’s export of authoritarian law, will richly inform wider theory on lawyers’ political activism as it also provides warnings and inspires resistance by lawyers in other times and places."– Terence Halliday, Research Professor Emeritus, American Bar Foundation; Honorary Professor, School for Asia and the Pacific, Australian national University; and co-author of Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work (Cambridge University Press 2016) "Yan-ho Lai, equipped with both civil society organization experiences and legal education, is the best author to write on legal repression and legal resistance in Hong Kong. His account of how China undermined Hong Kong's rule of law and how local lawyers pursued multiple paths to defend it in the post-Umbrella period offers a must-read analysis to understand the end of judicial independence since 2020."– Victoria Tin-bor Hui, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame "In this thoroughly researched and incisively argued book, Yan-ho Lai brings together his professional and academic expertise to chronicle the 'rule of law' battle between the Hong Kong legal profession and the Chinese Communist regime. As authoritarian legality becomes a worldwide tendency, this brilliant account of Hong Kong’s experience is a must read for the global public."– Ching Kwan Lee, author of Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle

• Abstract Acknowledgements List of Figures, Images and Tables 1. Introduction: Defending the Rule of Law in the Rise of Authoritarianism 2. China’s Authoritarian Legal Transplantation in Hong Kong 3. The United Front Work in Hong Kong’s Legal Community 4. Professional Rule of Law Discourse under State-Bar Relations 5. Organised Lawyers in Civil Society Empowerment 6. Defending Access to Justice in Social Movements 7. Leadership Contestation in the Bar 8. Political Awakening in the Law Society's Elections 9. Conclusion: Hong Kong’s Struggle for the Rule of Law Appendix: List of the Interviewees References Index