Waikeung Tam: Legal Mobilization Under Authoritarianism

Abstract

Legal Mobilization under Authoritarianism traces and explains the rise of law to a more prominent role in the politics of post-colonial Hong Kong. The author, Waikeung Tam, a political scientist, argues that Hong Kong is a ‘‘surprise’’ case, in the double sense that law is effectively mobilized despite the non-democratic and controlled setting within which the Hong Kong legal system works and also that law is mobilized in ways that different from what China would wish. There is quite a body of scholarship on the legal development of Hong Kong post-1997, with special attention paid to the performances of the relatively young Court of Final Appeal (CFA). But most of these works are written by legal scholars, whose concerns are more strictly jurisprudential and court-centered. Legal Mobilization treats the process of legal development within a broader sociopolitical context. It is, to my knowledge, one of the very few books that examine the post-colonial legal development of Hong Kong from the perspective of a social scientist. The strength of the book lies in its theoretical clarity and the wellorganized analytical framework it adopts. Tam argues that the successful case of Hong Kong is in part a consequence its historical legacies and in part an outcome of the opening up of the legal opportunities in the first decade of the post-colonial era. The book is divided into four parts. Part I sets out the theoretical framework and the overall argument of the book. Part II discusses the dynamic interplay between the opening up of legal opportunities and the narrowing of political opportunities in post-1997 Hong Kong. Part III discusses cause lawyering in Hong Kong. Part IV offers some concluding remarks. Its main data come from outcome and topical analyses of cases decided by the CFA and also its colonial predecessor, the Privy