LAWLESS

An attorney shares riveting stories of practicing law in Afghanistan.

The daughter of a Korean mother and an African American father, Motley grew up poor in Milwaukee, where she later began her career as a public defender. In 2008, leaving her three children and her husband, who was attending law school in North Carolina, Motley accepted a 12-month position with the Justice Sector Support Program in Afghanistan, building the criminal justice system there. While the job was often frustrating, the author found the challenges of practicing law in the country irresistible; when she finished her contract with JSSP, she set up a private practice in Kabul. Although her bread-and-butter work involved consulting and corporate law, she focuses on the cases closer to her heart, often involving abused women and children and imprisoned foreigners. Motley comes across as pragmatic and down-to-earth, sympathetic to her clients’ needs but also fascinated with solving the puzzle that constitutes each case. Working within the Afghan system, she has studied the Quran and decides where she needs to bend or break. Many of the pithy chapters are devoted to individual cases, which makes for lively, accessible reading. In one of the more intriguing chapters, Motley’s personal life, generally left out of the narrative, intersects with her professional life: Her husband, from whom she was separated, was shot during a carjacking, and she returned to the States to take his case. Motley uses her provocative stories about working in “a profoundly volatile and violent country,” one saturated by “continuing and pervasive misogyny,” to illustrate in practical terms what she calls “justness” rather than “justice”—“an imperfect but realistic outcome that suits an imperfect situation” and one that, intriguingly, owes more to “the Afghan approach to the law” than to what she learned in law school in the U.S.

A compelling account of a flexible legal advocate in unusual circumstances.