A broken trust

Abstract Over the last few years, Benin has fallen in democratic rankings, and international reports have increasingly highlighted the biased nature of its judicial institutions. This article examines lawyers’ changing relationship with the Beninese state – as a source of power and as a body of rules and institutions – through the lens of trust. Building on ethnographic fieldwork within law firms, it delves into the consequences of knowing that the state will not play by its own rules at trials, exploring the effects of political change on legal work and reflecting on what lawyers’ discourses and practices reveal about their imaginations and expectations of the state. Focussing on the daily work of defence lawyers not only helps further studies of legal professionals on the African continent, but it also contributes to recent debates on authoritarian legality by detailing the adaptation strategies of legal professionals as they operate within a politicised legal system.