Despite international conventions and human rights declarations, millions of people have suffered and continue to suffer torture, slavery, or violent deaths, with no remedy or recourse. They have fallen, in essence, “below the law,” outside of law’s protection. Often violated by their own governments, sometimes with support from transnational corporations, or nations benefiting from human rights violations, how can these victims find justice?  Lawyers Beyond Borders reveals the inner workings of the advances and retreats in the quest for redress and restoration of human rights for those whom international legal-political systems have failed. The process of justice begins in the US, with a handful of human rights lawyers steeped in the American tradition of advancing civil rights through civil litigation. As the civil rights movement gained traction and an ample supply of lawyers, this small cadre turned their attention toward advancing international human rights, via the US legal system. They sought to build another piece of the rights revolution, this time for survivors of egregious human rights violations in faraway lands. These cases were among the most unlikely to be slated for victory: The abuses occurred abroad; the victims are aliens, usually with few, if any, resources; the perpetrators are politically powerful, resourced, and well connected, often members of governments, militaries, or multinational corporations. The legal and political systems’ structures are mostly stacked against these survivors, many who bear the scars of trauma and terror.

Lawyers Beyond Borders is about agency. It is about how, in the face of powerful interests and seemingly insurmountable obstacles—political, psychological, economic, geographical, and physical—a small group of lawyers and survivors navigated a terrain of daunting barriers to begin building, case-by-case, new pathways to justice for those who otherwise would have none.

The civil rights era was a time of pervasive change in American political and social life. Among the decisive forces driving change were lawyers, who wielded the power of law to resolve competing concepts of order and equality and, in the end, to hold out the promise of a new and better nation.
           
The Search for Justice is a look the role of the lawyers throughout the period, focusing on one of the central issues of the time: school segregation. The most notable participants to address this issue were the public interest lawyers of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, whose counselors brought lawsuits and carried out appeals in state and federal courts over the course of twenty years. But also playing a part in the story were members of the bar who defended Jim Crow laws explicitly or implicitly and, in some cases, also served in state or federal government; lawyers who sat on state and federal benches and heard civil rights cases; and, finally, law professors who analyzed the reasoning of the courts in classrooms and public forums removed from the fray. With rich, copiously researched detail, Hoffer takes readers through the interactions of these groups, setting their activities not only in the context of the civil rights movement but also of their full political and legal legacies, including the growth of corporate private legal practice after World War II and the expansion of the role of law professors in public discourse, particularly with the New Deal. Seeing the civil rights era through the lens of law enables us to understand for the first time the many ways in which lawyers affected the course and outcome of the movement.