This article examines the role of cause lawyers in conflicted or authoritarian contexts where the chances of legal victory are often minimal. Drawing upon the literature on resistance, performance, memory studies, legal consciousness and the sociology of lawyers, the paper examines how cause lawyers challenge and subvert power. The paper first explores the tactics and strategies of cause lawyers who boycott legal proceedings and the relationship between such boycotts and broader political struggles, legitimacy and law. It then examines why and how cause lawyers engage in fairly hopeless legal struggles as acts of instrumental resistance (the ‘sand in the cogs’), transforming courts into sites of symbolic resistance, and using law as a form of memory work. The paper argues that boycott of and resistance through the courts can counter the use of law as an instrument of wickedness and a tool of denial and preserves a ‘stubborn optimism’ in the rule of law.

中文翻译：

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抵制、抵抗和法律：冲突和威权主义中的律师

本文探讨了事业律师在冲突或专制环境中的作用，在这些环境中，法律胜利的机会通常很小。借鉴抵抗、表现、记忆研究、法律意识和律师社会学的文献，本文考察了律师如何挑战和颠覆权力。本文首先探讨了公益律师抵制法律诉讼的策略和策略，以及这种抵制与更广泛的政治斗争、合法性和法律之间的关系。然后，它探讨了为什么以及如何导致律师作为工具性抵抗行为（“齿轮中的沙子”）从事相当无望的法律斗争，将法院转变为象征性抵抗的场所，并将法律用作记忆工作的一种形式。