Faith in end of history narratives emergent at the end of the 20^th century carried with it powerful ethical implications for engagement with authoritarian regimes. Perhaps the most widespread of these narratives was that economic development would invariably lead to political democratization or liberalization. Asserting this relationship offered up the alluring possibility that economic engagement with authoritarian regimes, even of the most self-interested sort, posed no ethical qualms as such engagement only helped hurry such regimes towards their inexorable demise. For lawyers from liberal nations this obviation was especially seductive exactly because they often assert their professions’ special links to promoting or sustaining democratic values. Therefore, engaging with authoritarian legal regimes, even strengthening their decidedly non-liberal aspects, was often cast as implicating none of the traditional concerns with complicity once at the heart of Cold War lawyering. No quick adoption of this stance was more marked than in the post-1978 engagement of American lawyers with the reforming Chinese Communist Party. Today, end of history teleologies have succumbed to not only resilient authoritarian regimes but also a global resurgence in authoritarian ideologies in liberal and illiberal regimes alike. Authoritarians have proven quite competent in sustaining economic development, even liberalization, while keeping democratic institutions from forming or flourishing. This development thus demands an renewed examination of the ethics of legal engagement with authoritarian regimes, especially as they have become thoroughly integrated into the world economy—and in no small part through significant transfers of legal technology from liberal nations. Such examination brings back to the surface long-standing tensions about the nature of lawyering that speak directly to the very anxieties about democracy and markets that have stimulated populist movements across the globe.