Thailand Law Journal 2011 Spring Issue 1 Volume 14

In sum, ambitious activists in the United States often pursue some type of public interest law practice.  My study asks why, in spite of Thailand’s less promising terrain, do Thai activists invest in law and what they achieve by doing so?   The research project from which the following case study has been selected gathered information about the careers of social justice lawyers in Thailand.  Biographical interviews with lawyers placed particular emphasis on what propelled each individual from family origins to university to becoming a lawyer, and from stage to stage over the arc of a career.⁴⁵  My interviews identified several generations and many different types of cause lawyers, some in traditional practitioner rules, but others whose human rights and social cause advocacy involves careers as organizers, administrators, and university faculty.   The lifetimes of the interviewees span Thai history from the 1920s, when the oldest was born under the absolute monarchy, to the present, under Thailand’s eighteenth constitution.   The oldest began practicing law in 1951, under a  military dictator, and the youngest in the first decade of the twenty-first century, in a democracy just a few years after the ratification of Thailand’s acclaimed liberal constitution, the so-called “People’s Constitution.”  Changes which occurred over this eighty-year period, in the structure and institutions of government, economy, and society, interweave the stories of the lawyers, shaping their careers.⁴⁶

1. The landscape of cause lawyering   

The Blacksmith Institute never considered why there were no “environmental litigators” in Thailand prior to 1999, and judging by its search strategy – an email circulated to human rights organizations – it had no idea where one could be found.

Until the nineteenth century, governance in the feudal society of Siam, renamed Thailand in 1939, was adapted to the needs of a powerful monarch and his local subordinates who exercised traditional authority.  In the pre-constitutional era before 1932, King Chulalongkorn’s (1853-1910) late nineteenth century “defensive modernization” of the Thai state included gradual Westernization of its legal institutions: establishment of courts, adoption of civil and criminal codes, and bureaucratic administration.⁴⁷  State administration remained highly centralized, answerable to the king, and remote from the vast majority of ordinary Thai.  The legal system King was influenced by both civil and common law institutions, although the prevalence of code law, absence of citizen participation, and limited authority for judicial review suggests the predominance of civil law.⁴⁸  Thus, Thailand has had civil and criminal courts of general jurisdiction since the early twentieth century, but law and the courts remained remote from the lives of Thailand’s mostly rural population until much later. 

The monarchy’s historical compromise with Western power opened Thai legal culture to the influence of powerful new values, including the concepts of equality and human rights.⁴⁹  These new values, along with other elements of European culture, were embraced by some members of the educated elite, but the attraction was by no means universal.  Nevertheless, a slow transformation began which contributed to overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932 by a group of commoners educated in the West who rose to power in government, including a group of military leaders.⁵⁰  Pridi Banomyong, the intellectual force behind the elite revolution that created a constitutional monarchy in 1932, made establishment of a public university to educate government officials one of his first priorities.  In 1933, as Prime Minister, Pridi founded the University of Moral and Political Science (now Thammasat University), offering an undergraduate curriculum in law and other subjects.  Pridi expected the majority of graduates to enter public service and to help establish a new mission for government—being responsive to the needs of the people—but his attempt to establish a Parliamentary democracy was short-lived.⁵¹  Generals who made up the majority of the revolutionary party had ambitions of their own and soon pushed Pridi aside, promoting a new nationalism that combined the authority of the monarchy, the symbolic representation of the nation, and the sacred power of Buddhism under a central administration.  From 1947–1973, Thailand was ruled by military dictators.⁵²

Graduates of Thammasat University who aspired to practice law on behalf of marginal or dissenting groups in the 1950s and 1960s confronted a ruthless dictatorship, survival in an era of virulent anti-communism, and eking out a living in a small law practice without the protection of an organized, sympathetic profession.  A second generation of social justice lawyers entered the legal profession under radically different circumstances.  In the 1960s, a rapidly growing economy and an expanding university system (supported in significant part by American philanthropies) created an upwardly mobile generation of university students.  The defining moment in their identities as members of an important generation occurred on October 14, 1973, when a student-led uprising toppled the American-backed military dictators.⁵³  The uprising – really a series of peaceful, though strident, demonstrations which the military unsuccessfully attempted to suppress – and its aftermath became a watershed for organized activism, including cause lawyering.  The events of the so-called “October revolution” also marked a moment of public awareness of the importance of constitutionalism and responsive government.    The years 1973-1976 became a true “constititonal moment.”  Military rule returned in 1976 after a second bloody confrontation between the military and students because, in part, a wavering middle class favored stability, even if it meant authoritarian government.  Government persecution of the October activists drove many student radicals to join the communists in the countryside.  But by the end of the 1970s, a more moderate authoritarian regime attempted to heal this rift by welcoming the dissidents back into Thai society.⁵⁴  The NGO movement was a product of Thailand’s watershed student-led overthrow of a US backed dictatorship in October, 1973.  Denied support for human rights that American philanthropies provided to resist Latin American dictators during the same decade, Thai aspirations for responsive government were often shaped by readings drawn less from western ideals of liberal democracy and human rights than from European socialism or Marxism and from examples of militant populism nearer at hand, namely China.  The “October generation” committed itself to learning about Thailand’s vast, oppressed rural majority, its slums, its social and economic inequalities, and its desires for greater popular participation in government.  Learning about Thailand’s social problems, power, and inequality was encouraged through visits to the countryside to study and help, and by Thammasat University’s liberal rector who established a program which placed graduates in positions with NGOs.⁵⁵  Driven to the jungles when the dictators returned for a brief time, the student activists returned to take the lead in building a “people’s sector” which Thailand’s polity lacked.

Equality, anti-authoritarianism, and social justice are ideals that have particular appeal for the generation of Thai who lived through the end of the era of brutal military rule and October, 1973 student-led uprising, and many members of the “October generation” continue in active roles in universities, government, and private enterprise.  Not only was the rising tide of discontent and idealism among students validated in 1973, shaping the careers of many, but Pridi’s public service ideals for legal education were reinforced and reshaped for some, especially at Thammasat, now emphasizing transformation of civil society as well as government.  For later generations Thammasat became the most desirable law school for candidates with a commitment to social causes and the source of a disproportionate number of new cause lawyers.⁵⁶ The political consciousness of generation social justice lawyers was deeply influenced by the uprising and what came after it.  Some became teachers and organizers in the countryside.  Those who fled in 1976 returned from the jungle in 1979 to a greatly altered political landscape.  During the 1980s, under stable, military-led governments, the economy again grew rapidly, attracting Japanese and Western investors.  The October generation’s legacy grew through the efforts of the returning activists who helped build a vibrant NGO movement in both the poorer parts of the countryside and in urban centers.  Later generations of social justice lawyers entered a field of activist law practice with the legacy of a small, but courageous first generation – already aging and remote – and a growing NGO movement assisted by the work of lawyer/organizers who lived through the uprising.

45. The interviews emphasized the relationships and experiences that helped to locate each individual in a “field of power” – a social field comprised of knowledge and practices that shape the life courses of members of a generational cohort.  See Pierre Bourdieu & Loïc J.D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology 17-18 (Univ. of Chicago Press 1992). I have also gathered information about opportunities and resources that might have been available to an aspiring activist in order to explain why particular opportunities, resources, or limitations were present at certain times and under certain circumstances.

46. This collective biographical and relational approach to studying advocacy, law, and social movements has suggested that there have been at least four broad time periods, determined by the changes which seemed most significant to the lawyers themselves, during which their careers assumed different patterns, which I call “generations:” 1) lawyers under military governments following World War II (1950-1970), 2) lawyers who are members of the 1973 October generation (1970-1980), 3) law students influenced by the October generation and drawn to activism in the 1980s and 1990s, and 4) lawyers who graduated after the adoption of the 1997 constitution.  See Frank Munger, Globalization, Investing in Law, and the Careers of Lawyers for Social Cause:  Taking on Rights in Thailand, 53 N.Y. L. Sch. L. Rev. 745 (2009).

47. Baker & Phongpaichit, supra note 24, at 47–80.

48. See Frank C. Darling, The Evolution of Law in Thailand, 32 Rev. of Pol. 197 (1970); Borwornsak Uwanno & Surakiart Sathirathai, Introduction to the Thai Legal System, 4 Chulalongkorn L. Rev. 39, 40–50 (1986). 

49. See David M. Engel, Law and Kingship in Thailand During the Reign of King Chulalongkorn (Univ. of Michigan Center for South & Southeast Asian Studies, Paper No. 9, 1975).

50. Baker & Phongpaichit, supra note 24, at 109–21.

51. See id. at 123, 143–144

52. See David Morell & Chai-anan Samudavanija, Political Conflict in Thailand:  Reform, Reaction, Revolution 5 (Oelgeschlager Gunn & Hain 1988).  At the beginning of World War I, a strongly nationalist and military dominated government renamed the country Thailand.  Baker & Phongpaichit, supra note 24, at 132.

53. Baker & Phongpaichit, supra note 24, at 185-190.

54. Baker & Phongpaichit, supra note 24 at 196–97.

55. See id. at 180–89; Craig J. Reynolds, Thai Radical Discourse:  The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today (Cornell Univ. Southeast Asia Program 1987).

56. Graduates from Thammasat University form the largest group among my interviewees, but the second largest group graduated from Ramkamhaeng University.  Cause lawyers who graduated from Ramkamhaeng may be numerous in part because the university is very large, and many more law students graduate each year from Ramkamhaeng than from other universities in Bangkok.  More significant for purposes of my research, virtually all cause lawyers from Thailand’s Muslim south attended this law school.

This article is published with the kind permission of Frank Munger. The article originally appeared Originally appeared in Volume 9 of the International review of constitutional ion (2009).