With over thirty cause lawyering associations of various sizes, persuasions, and degrees of permanence pursuing issues that range from a right-wing concern with defending the nation to a left-wing desire to overturn the capitalist order, the Turkish landscape of legal activism has never been more diverse than today. This paper is an attempt at making sense of this diversity. I ask: What lies behind Turkey’s variety of cause lawyering associations, and why have these associations particularly flowered under the AK Parti government? How do they position their activism within the resources offered by the Turkish legal field? Do they conceive of the law as an independent juridical order or as a set of legal instruments to be used for political purposes? To answer these questions I consult archival sources, newspapers and court transcripts reaching back to early 1970s. This material provides grounds for arguing that the surprisingly wide array of lawyering associations in Turkey reflects, not just political causes, but also the fragmentation of Turkey’s legal system and the conception of juridical unity that underlies it. Since the 1970s, Turkish state leaders have repeatedly taken recourse to “parallel” instruments such as exceptional courts and martial law in order to use the legal system for purposes of political repression. In response to this, I argue, activist lawyers have developed associations that differ from each other not just in the core causes they pursue but also in their strategies of activism, ranging from lawyering that stays squarely within the procedural rules of the courtroom to street protest. The diversity of lawyering associations thus reflects both a political spectrum and a fundamental disagreement over how a fragmented legal system such as Turkey’s should be dealt with.