Following a coup in 1962, the legal sector in Myanmar, then Burma, went into a protracted and steep decline. The practice of law fell from its earlier high status to that of a hobby or amateurish pursuit. The legal profession transformed into what this chapter characterizes as a legal occupation: legal education degenerated, the national bar association lost autonomy, and lawyers daring to challenge state power were met with strict sanctions. Myanmar’s opening up in the 2010s has brought international attention to its legal occupation as well as questions of access to justice and the rule of law. Drawing on in-depth cumulative research of almost a decade from 2008 to 2017, in this chapter we present findings which suggest that having weathered decades of military dictatorship under which even the assertion of minimal legal rights brought parties into conflict with the state, lawyers in the 2010s found both the wherewithal and the desire to refashion the legal sector in Myanmar. Following the work of Lucien Karpik and his co-authors, we class our subjects of inquiry as ‘political lawyers’, insofar as they mobilize for basic legal freedoms as well as civil and political rights by drawing on an array of material and social resources.