Famously, Marx said, in the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: ‘Philosophers have interpreted
the world in various ways, but the point is to change it’.1 Aside from the
academic purpose of the work, with this book, I have one specific practical aim.
In this book I examine both legal scholarship and legal practice. The examination
of practice is inspired by the work of practising lawyers I have met
over the years and also by my own time in practice. Michael Sfard, one of the
best-known anti-occupation lawyers working in the Israeli court system, has
expressed the need for academic reflection on cause lawyering practice, and, in
particular, to analyse how such practice may constitute the lifeblood of the system
of oppression it is seeking to overturn. He observes that practising lawyers’
ethics prevent them from turning away individual clients whose lives might
be marginally improved through litigation, in favour of the ‘collective struggle’
(which may be helped by, say, boycotting the courts).2 The onus of finding the
way through this dilemma, he argues, is on legal academics. Legal academics
in his view have the obligation to rise above the perspective of individual cases
and provide practitioners with a better understanding of how human rights
litigation in mass abuse cases works to sustain the system.