We often frame authoritarianism as lawless, marked by constitutional rupture or institutional breakdown. But some of the most effective assaults on democracy have operated through law itself.

Around the world, leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Viktor Orbán, the former prime minister of Hungary, have used legal systems, rules of law, and institutional practices to consolidate power, restrict dissent, and hollow out democratic accountability from within. That pattern is becoming more visible in the United States, where mounting political pressure on courts, lawyers, and legal institutions is raising urgent questions about the role of the legal profession in moments of democratic crisis. 

“Lawyering Without Law,” a bi-weekly podcast from the Knight Institute, interrogates the unique and important role that lawyers play in defending democracy, or in facilitating the slide into authoritarianism. Hosted by Knight Institute Senior Fellow and Columbia Law Professor Madhav Khosla and the Knight Intitute’s Research Director Katy Glenn Bass, the series brings together scholars, litigators, and practitioners to explore these dynamics across historical and contemporary contexts. Drawing on global examples of democratic backsliding, each episode connects these developments to the United States and outlines what is at stake for the legal profession and for democracy itself. 

Read more about Khosla’s research project with the Knight Institute examining the crucial role that lawyers can play in preserving democratic freedoms and institutions here.

“Lawyering Without Law” is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get podcasts.

Listen, subscribe, and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think.

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Episode Six: International Law, Crimes, and Accountability

International law is often imagined as a mechanism of accountability—a way to hold states and individuals responsible for criminal acts. But what if the system was never built to do that? In this final episode of “Lawyering Without Law,” hosts Madhav Khosla and Katy Glenn Bass are joined by Tom Dannenbaum, professor of law at Stanford, and Aslı Ü Bâli, professor of law at Yale, to discuss what international law can and cannot do in a moment of mounting global crises. They examine why accountability at the international level has always been extremely rare—especially for powerful states—and reframe international law more as a system for political mobilization, legitimacy, and restraint.

Against the backdrop of the war in Gaza, U.S. strikes on Iran and in the Caribbean, and open contempt for international institutions from Washington and beyond, Dannenbaum and Bâli debate whether we are witnessing an erosion of the post-war order or a new assault on the very idea that law can constrain power at all. 

Transcript: Ep. 6.

Further Reading

 

Episode Five: Lawyering Under 20th Century Authoritarianism


We often imagine authoritarianism as the abandonment of law, a moment of rupture when constitutions are torn up and courts are shut down. But some of history’s most effective assaults on democracy have worked through law rather than against it. In this episode, host Madhav Khosla is joined by David Dyzenhaus, professor of law and philosophy at the University of Toronto, and Jan-Werner Müller, professor of politics at Princeton University, to examine how repressive regimes from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa governed through lawyers, courts, and legal theory, and how those 20th-century cases illuminate the present. Drawing on the dilemmas faced by human rights lawyers under unjust regimes, they discuss the role of the legal profession, why aspiring autocrats attack lawyers and other professions, what it means when professional identity collapses into political loyalty, and whether lawyers who stay inside a compromised system are preserving the rule of law or merely lending it legitimacy.

Transcript: Ep. 5. 

Further Reading

 

Episode Four: From Torture to Trump: How the Expansion of Executive Power after 9/11 Eroded Accountability and the Rule of Law


The Bush administration’s use of torture after 9/11 was aided by government lawyers who provided contorted legal justifications for its use against detainees. In this episode, Alberto Mora, who served as General Counsel of the Navy during the George W. Bush administration, joins hosts Katy Glenn Bass and Madhav Khosla to recount how he discovered that interrogators at Guantánamo Bay detention facility had been authorized to use techniques that he believed qualified as torture. He explains how his initial assumption that this was due to misguided advice by other lawyers that could be corrected gave way to the realization that the abuse was deliberate and sanctioned at the highest levels of the United States government. Mora reflects on the moral and strategic costs of torture, the failure to hold high-level government officials accountable for authorizing it, and how that absence of accountability has helped pave the way for the broader erosion of legal norms we see today.

Transcript: Ep. 4. 

Further Reading

 

Episode Three: When Lawyers Stop Following the Rules: How Politics Became Law


What happens when lawyers stop believing that law and politics are different things? Constitutional law scholar Deborah Pearlstein joins host Katy Glenn Bass to discuss legal ethics, the rule of law, and how decades of erosion of norms within the legal profession have fueled the democratic backsliding we’re witnessing in America today.

Pearlstein’s scholarship and her forthcoming book, Losing the Law, map the forces that have weakened the ethical foundations of American law—from the Reagan-era DOJ and the rise of the conservative legal movement, to the diminishing options for holding lawyers accountable for actions that undermine democracy. 

Her diagnosis is sobering. But Pearlstein also offers a surprising and ambitious proposal for how the legal profession and American democracy might find their way back.

Transcript: Ep. 3. 

Further Reading

 

Episode Two: Principle vs. Profit: How Institutions Lose Their Way


Bribery is the corruption we prosecute. But according to Lawrence Lessig, it’s institutional corruption that poses the most danger to American democracy. Hosts Katy Glenn Bass and Madhav Khosla speak with the Harvard Law professor who makes a pointed distinction: the corruption hollowing out American institutions isn’t about bribes, it’s structural—the capture of courts, law firms, corporations, and Congress by economic dependencies pull each away from its founding purpose and leave them vulnerable to political pressure. Yet Lessig finds hope in the lawyers who have refused to bend, in universities that eventually drew a line, and in preparing law students to make professional decisions that align with their values.

Transcript: Ep. 2.

Further Reading

 

Episode One: What Does Legal Authoritarianism Look Like?


What does authoritarianism look like when it operates through law? In the first episode of “Lawyer Without Law,” hosts Katy Glenn Bass and Madhav Khosla speak with Princeton University Professor Kim Lane Scheppele. They explore historic examples of the legal profession’s role in democratic backsliding around the world and in the United States.

They examine how authoritarian leaders have exploited legal systems to consolidate power, what that means for legal institutions as democratic norms come under strain, and how lawyers have too often been complicit in this dynamic. 

Transcript: Ep. 1. 

Further Reading