This paper traces the emergence of a liberal public in the period following the 1980 military coup in Turkey, defined by its contestation of the foundational elements of Turkish national identity, including the legal codification of Turkishness, and of the authoritarian practices of the Turkish state. Liberal intellectuals, as prominent articulators within this public, established a complex institutional landscape, ranging from publishing houses and newspapers to universities and NGOs, which has enabled new rights claims to be made and new identities to form in the public sphere. Here, liberals engaged with the Kurdish issue, the legitimacy of Islamic actors in the political sphere, as well as challenged the official position on the Armenian genocide of 1915 and argued for the issue’s contemporary political relevance. This struggle to reformulate the basis of the Turkish polity has oftentimes led to legal consequences. This paper investigates three institutionally different attempts by liberal intellectuals seeking to advance a more inclusive and more plural public sphere by engaging with these themes. In what ways did they mobilize the law in their own rhetoric and to what extent did this result in legal repercussions? The first endeavor analyzes the establishment of the political party Yeni Demokrasi Hareketi (New Democracy Movement) in 1994, which propagated a liberal-democratic discourse and advocated political and cultural rights for Kurds and other groups. While it did poorly in the parliamentary elections, it received much public attention since key members were well-connected in media circles and its bold discourse challenged nationalist orthodoxies. The second example is the ‘Minority report affair’ in 2004, a government-commissioned project to formulate a new definition of Turkish citizenship that would transcend the ethnically defined category for which the principal authors of the report were indicted. Finally, the paper investigates the activities of the think tank TESEV and how it has managed to navigate the three fraught issues over the course of two decades. These different forms of public making illuminate how liberals have sought to reformulate and reconstitute the public sphere in relation to Turkish authoritarian nationalism at different times over a 20-year period and attempts to explain the respective legal mobilizations or lack thereof.