Lawyer Activism and Legalism’s Uneven Paths in East Asia

Sida Liu

Celeste Arrington’s From Manners to Rules: Advocating for Legalism in South Korea and Japan is an important contribution to the study of law and politics in East Asia and to sociolegal scholarship more generally. The book asks a deceptively simple question: why have South Korea and Japan, long described as societies that prefer informal ordering, bureaucratic guidance, and social norms over adversarial legalism, increasingly turned to more legalistic modes of governance? Arrington’s answer is that this turn to courts, lawyers, formal rights, and legal rules as tools of governance cannot be understood only as a story of state modernization, elite institutional design, globalization, or American influence. Instead, it must also be understood from the bottom up, through the work of lawyers, activists, and civil society groups who mobilized law to transform regulation and governance.

The book’s title captures this transformation elegantly. “Manners” suggest a traditional East Asian regulatory style based on “informal, flexible ‘soft-law’ measures, such as administrative guidance via nonbinding recommendations or warning letters” and dependent on “opaque networks of bureaucrats, political elites, and regulatory interests [that] cooperated to design and implement policies” (p. 4). “Rules,” by contrast, suggest a world in which obligations are articulated, rights are asserted, procedures are formalized, and compliance is monitored through judicial and administrative channels. Japan and South Korea have often been described as societies in which disputes were managed through apology, mediation, or administrative guidance rather than formal legal confrontation. ¹. Arrington does not deny the importance of this nonlegalistic approach, which “often ‘privatized’ disputes by granting preemptive but limited concessions or mobilized societal groups from the top down to help achieve policy aims” (pp. 4-5). Rather, she treats the rise of legalism in these two “hard cases” as the core puzzle of her book.

Theoretically, the book follows the American law-and-society tradition, especially the literature on legal mobilization and the role of legal opportunity structures. In that tradition, law is not merely a set of commands issued by the state. It is also a resource, a discourse, and an arena for political struggle.² Rights become meaningful not simply because legislatures enact them or courts announce them, but because individuals and groups invoke them, organize around them, and pressure institutions to recognize them. Arrington brings this framework to bear on Japan and South Korea, two countries often thought to sit uneasily within legal mobilization theory because of their historically lower litigation rates, strong bureaucracies, and dense informal norms. The result is a careful comparative account of how legalism can emerge through bottom-up advocacy by legal professionals and other social actors.

By legalism, Arrington means “a legalistic turn in governance when rules and procedures become more formalized, transparent, detailed, and legally enforceable via fines or other sanctions” (p. 32). Following Robert Kagan’s classic typology of legalism³ along the two dimensions of formality and participation, she argues that legalistic modes of governance make “policymaking and dispute resolution more rules based and accessible” (p. 34). Using the two empirical cases of disability rights and tobacco control, the book focuses on lawyers and activists as underappreciated drivers of the legalistic turn.

Much of the existing literature on East Asian legal transformation emphasizes political elites, state-building, judicial empowerment, or institutional reforms adopted in response to global market demands.⁴ These factors are undoubtedly important. Japan’s postwar legal order, South Korea’s democratization, judicial reform projects, and the pressures of global economic integration all helped reshape the legal environment in which citizens and organizations operated. But Arrington shows that such accounts are incomplete if they overlook the actors who seized upon openings in the legal system and pushed institutions toward more legalistic forms of governance and accountability.

In Arrington’s account, lawyers and activists do not simply respond to preexisting legal and political opportunities; they help create them. In both tobacco control and disability rights, they introduce new ideas in legal terms, initiate lobbying, litigation, and media campaigns, and work with receptive courts and officials to advocate stronger regulatory frameworks. Legal and political opportunity structures matter, but they are not static structural conditions. They are shaped over time by mobilization itself. This account avoids both institutional determinism and romanticization of legal professionals. Through the five mechanisms of rights framing, brokerage, information subsidies, strategic litigation, and accountability politics (p. 42), activists and lawyers demand more formalized regulations and participatory policy processes, thereby shaping regulatory style and contributing to legalistic governance.

This book is especially useful for scholars of comparative law and comparative politics. The “legalistic regulatory style” that Arrington identifies in Korea and Japan is not unique to those two countries. Across the world, states are increasingly turning to law, formal procedures, judicial review, compliance mechanisms, and rights discourse as tools of governance. Even authoritarian regimes have embraced legal forms. China is perhaps the most prominent example. In the early twenty-first century, China has promulgated an enormous body of statutes, expanded legal education and the legal profession, professionalized the judiciary, and promoted law-based governance as a core element of state capacity and legitimacy. Even as the Chinese state has deepened its authoritarianism, it has increasingly invoked legality, procedure, and regulatory discipline as part of its governing project.⁵

But the case of China also highlights a tension in Arrington’s bottom-up mobilization approach to legalism. In the American law-and-society tradition, especially studies in the progressive era of the late 20^th century, legal mobilization often appears as a central engine of legal and political change. Social movements, public interest lawyers, rights advocates, and cause lawyers push courts and legislatures to recognize new rights claims. Even when they lose in court, their activism can shift public discourse, generate political pressure, and reshape regulatory agendas. This model travels well in some contexts, including the Japanese and Korean cases examined by Arrington. Yet the Chinese experience suggests that the relationship between bottom-up legal mobilization and the rise of legalism can be much more fraught.

In China, lawyers and activists also attempted to use law as a language of accountability. The weiquan (rights-defense) movement from the 2000s to the early 2010s demonstrated that legal mobilization could emerge even in an authoritarian context.⁶ Together with other civil society groups, Chinese activist lawyers defended political dissidents, brought administrative lawsuits, challenged land takings, represented victims of discrimination, and used constitutional language to make claims against arbitrary state power. For a time, these efforts seemed to suggest that legal mobilization might gradually expand the space for legal and political rights.

The state’s response, however, was repression. Activist lawyers were disbarred, detained, monitored, and imprisoned.⁷ Advocacy organizations were closed or brought under tighter control. Courts were instructed to serve political priorities. The Chinese state continued to build legal institutions and promote “law-based governance,” but it did so while sharply limiting grassroots legal mobilization. In this sense, China’s recent turn toward legalism has occurred not because of bottom-up mobilization by lawyers and activists, but despite it, and in some respects against it. Law has certainly become more important to the state’s governance and legitimacy, but not as a result of civil society pressure. Instead, legalism has been incorporated into the state’s own project of administrative control, discipline, and rationalization.

This comparison does not undermine Arrington’s argument about the legalistic turn in East Asia; rather, it helps clarify its scope and significance. From Manners to Rules shows that in South Korea and Japan, lawyers and activists played an important role in pushing governance toward more formal legal rules. China reminds us that this pathway is contingent. Legal mobilization is not a universal mechanism that automatically produces legalistic governance. Its effectiveness depends on regime type, judicial and professional autonomy, civil society strength, and the state’s willingness to tolerate rights-based claims. Where those conditions are absent, legal mobilization may provoke repression even as the state continues to legalize governance on its own terms.

This point invites a broader rethinking of the role of legal mobilization in comparative sociolegal studies. The American law-and-society tradition has generated some of the most powerful concepts in the field, but it sometimes assumes a social context of ideological pluralism, institutional openness, and adversarial contestation that cannot be taken for granted elsewhere. In the United States, courts have long been central arenas for politics; lawyers enjoy professional autonomy; advocacy organizations can organize openly; and rights discourse has deep cultural legitimacy. Even there, legal mobilization has limits and can produce backlash when politics and governance take an authoritarian turn. But in many societies, the obstacles to advocating for legalism are more fundamental. Lawyers may be dependent on the state, courts may lack autonomy, civil society may be restricted, and rights claims may be viewed as threats to political order.⁸

Arrington’s book is therefore valuable not only because it extends legal mobilization theory to Japan and Korea, but also because it pushes readers to think more carefully about the conditions under which legal mobilization matters in different societies. Her case studies show that legalism can grow from below when activists and lawyers are able to exploit institutional openings, construct networks, and frame grievances in ways that resonate with broader publics and policymakers. A comparison with China, however, suggests that bottom-up legal mobilization is neither necessary nor sufficient for the rise of legalistic governance. States can legalize for their own reasons, including economic development, bureaucratic control, global legitimacy, and political discipline. Conversely, lawyers and activists can mobilize law without successfully transforming governance, sometimes with tragic consequences.

1. Daniel H. Foote, The Benevolent Paternalism of Japanese Criminal Justice, 80 Calif. L. Rev. 317 (1992); Celeste L. Arrington, Rights Claiming through the Courts: Changing Legal Opportunity Structures in South Korea, in Rights Claiming in South Korea 151 (Celeste L. Arrington & Patricia Goedde eds., 2021)
2. Stuart A. Scheingold, The Politics of Rights: Lawyers, Public Policy, and Political Change (1974); Charles R. Epp, The Rights Revolution (1998).
3. Robert A. Kagan, Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Life (2001).
4. Lynette J. Chua, David M. Engel, and Sida Liu, The Asian Law and Society Reader (2023).
5. Taisu Zhang and Tom Ginsburg, China’s Turn toward Law, 59 Vanderbilt J. Intl. L. 306 (2019).
6. Hualing Fu and Richard Cullen, Weiquan (Rights Protection) Lawyering in an Authoritarian State: Building a Culture of Public-Interest Lawyering, 59 The China J. 111 (2008); Eva Pils, China’s Human Rights Lawyers: Advocacy and Resistance (2015); Sida Liu and Terence C. Halliday, Criminal Defense in China: The Political of Lawyers at Work (2016); Qin Ma, Who Are the Chinese Sǐkē (Diehard) Lawyers? A Belated Clarification, 10 China L. Soc. Rev. 1 (2025).
7. Hualing Fu, The July 9th (709) Crackdown on Human Rights Lawyers: Legal Advocacy in an Authoritarian State, 27 J. Contemp. China 554 (2018).
8. Lynette J. Chua, Legal Mobilization and Authoritarianism, 15 Annual Rev. L. Soc. Sci. 355 (2019).