Fighting for Political Freedom: Comparative Studies of the Legal Complex and Political Liberalism by Terence C. Halliday, Lucien Karpik, and Malcolm M. Feeley, eds.

Most mainstream media coverage of lawyers tends to focus on individual court rulings orspectacular cases of individual character deficiencies within the legal profession.Consequently, society in general has formed a world view that tends to overlook the role oflegal actors in struggling for basic rights in all except the most exceptional cases. FightingFor Political Freedom: Comparative Studies of the Legal Complex and Political Liberalism thus fills an essential gap in providing a view into worlds where “ordinary” members of thelegal complex regularly play pivotal roles in advancing the causes of liberal society. Thebook frames its arguments by defining a “legal complex” whose core is composed of lawyersand judges, but extends far beyond this to include all legally trained personnel in a society,including civil servants and prosecutors involved in administering justice. The mostimpressive contribution made by this book is the universality of the theory of the legalcomplex’s relationship to political liberalism, and the application of the theory through acollection of case studies spanning four continents. The 16 case studies in the book providea particularly useful reference guide for academics and human rights activists in the struggleto establish or protect basic human rights in a wide variety of countries.