Law and Social Movements Mccann

28 Sep 2006 17:7 AR ANRV291-LS02-02.

tex XMLPublishSM (2004/02/24) P1: JRX

10.1146/annurev.lawsocsci.2.081805.105917
Annu. Rev. Law Soc. Sci. 2006. 2:17–38

doi: 10.1146/annurev.lawsocsci.2.081805.105917
Copyright c 2006 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
First published online as a Review in Advance on June 5, 2006
LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS:

Contemporary Perspectives
Michael McCann
Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195;
Access provided by Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP) on 10/22/18. For personal use only.
email: [email protected]
Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2006.2:17-38. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
Key Words legal mobilization, social justice

■ Abstract Social movement scholars have long seemed little interested in law, and
traditional legal scholars were little interested in social movement analysis by social
scientists. However, recent years have seen growth of interest in the topic of law and
social movements, with inquiry led by political scientists and law and society scholars.
This review surveys that diverse literature, beginning with general theory regarding
core concepts and then moving to a review of empirical studies organized around the
multi-stage model derived from political process approaches and legal mobilization
frameworks. The primary argument of the review is that law is contingent, and how
it matters for social movements varies with the context and character of struggle.
Most analysts agree that law generally works to support status quo conventions and
hierarchical relationships, but sometimes law can be mobilized to challenge and even
reconstitute the terms of institutional order.
INTRODUCTION
Rigorous study of law and social movements has been a surprisingly limited and
marginal intellectual endeavor in the modern American academy.1 Social science
scholarship on social movements has documented many case studies in which
legal claims, tactics, and actors figured or failed prominently, but these studies
have rarely provided direct conceptual analysis about how law does or does not
matter for the struggles at stake, and generally they have remained quite uninformed
by sophisticated socio-legal analysis. In short, social movement scholars do not
seem much interested in law. Traditional legal scholars in law schools, by contrast,
have written at length about litigation campaigns, judicial actions, and normative
aspirations for rights-based social justice connected to social movements. But most
of this scholarship has remained court-centered, sticking close to official case law
and actions of legal elites while remaining distant from grassroots movement
activity. Most such study is neither empirically rigorous about identifying the key
1
This review is a significantly revised and updated version of several essays that I have
previously published in other volumes, including but not limited to McCann (1998, 2004).
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18 MCCANN
elements of social movement organization, activity, and context nor theoretically

informed by social movement theory.
Socio-legal scholars have drawn on social science traditions to provide manifold
insights about both the ways that prevailing legal norms tend to legitimate social
hierarchy and the complex manifestations of legal claims and tactics by groups
aiming to challenge those hierarchies and injustices. Indeed, socio-legal scholars
have contributed many types of studies—of judicial impact, interest group litiga-
tion, cause lawyering, the politics of rights, civil disputing, and everyday resistance,
to name just a few—that are highly relevant to understanding the relationships of
law and social movements. Again, however, most of this scholarship has granted
at best passing notice to social movement theory.2

There are some signs that these tendencies have begun to change in the last
decade, however, and that a productive dialogue is developing that connects pre-
viously separate modes of analysis regarding law and social movements. A lively
debate developed in the mid-1990s between representatives of court-centered,
top-down approaches to studying reform litigation and advocates of more legally
decentered, movement-oriented studies of law. From initial debates spurred by
several influential books (see Rosenberg 1991, 1992, 1996; McCann 1992, 1994,
1996, 2004) arose debates enlisting other scholars (Gottlieb & Schultz 1998) and
many new studies of law, social movements, and judicial impact (Silverstein 1996,
Canon & Johnson 1998, Polletta 2000, Marshall 2003, Pedriana 2004, Anderson
2005; M. Paris, unpublished manuscript). Whatever their differences, both camps
adopted a generally sober view toward legal action as a resource for egalitarian
social change and emphasized the study of contextual factors for understanding
variable outcomes of litigation and other legal campaigns. A few years later a much
cited volume of essays in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (see espe-
cially Rubin 2001, Eskridge 2001, Siegel 2001) was dedicated to a separate analysis
of law and social movements. Moreover, the most recent volume of the ongoing
cause lawyering project by leading socio-legal scholars has focused specifically
on the role of activist attorneys in social movements (Sarat & Scheingold 2006).
Finally, scholars interested in social movement activity beyond the United States,
in both national and transnational contexts, increasingly have focused on law and
rights as important dimensions of struggles for justice.
Overall, these latter trends are welcome and signal promising lines of inquiry.
However, there remain some problematic tendencies that limit even these recent
scholarly efforts to connect law and social movements. For one thing, much of
the new literature echoes old position-taking between those scholars who insist on
complementary relationships between legal tactics and social movements and those
who see mostly counterproductive tensions. This normative position-taking on the
instrumental value of legal tactics is especially evident among law school scholars.
2
Handler’s (1978) classic drew heavily on resource mobilization models that were popular
in the 1970s, and McCann (1986) integrated a mix of different theoretical elements into the
study of law and social elements. But these are rare exceptions among scholarship prior to
the 1990s.
LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 19
For example, Eskridge (2001) has written an influential set of articles aiming to
correct the failure of social scientists who study social movements to appreciate
law and legal actors. In making his case, he generalizes repeatedly that “law and
legal actors are critical to the instigation and dynamics, as well as the goals” of
identity politics by social movements (Eskridge 2001, pp. 421–22). By contrast,
Brown-Nagin (2005) challenges such a view in a study of recent affirmative action
cases, contending that “social movements and juridical law are fundamentally in
tension. . . . Social movements are more likely to achieve their goals when they are
free from the constraints imposed by law and lawyers—even the politically astute
ones” (p. 1502). Such entrenched normative commitments often overdetermine
empirical accounts and discourage attention to the complexities, contingencies,

and ironies at stake in legal mobilization. This contrasts with most social scientists
who, while varying in the degrees of inherent skepticism about the proclivities of
lawyers, litigation, and courts for promoting egalitarian social change, tend to view
the relationships of social movement mobilization as highly variable and contingent
on a mix of legal and extralegal social factors that should be the subject of empirical
inquiry. “How law does and does not matter” is the key question, not taking sides
in debates over instrumental effectiveness. As McCann (2004) has put it,
Legal mobilization does not inherently disempower or empower citizens. How
law matters depends on the complex, often changing dynamics of the context
in which struggles occur. Legal relations, institutions, and norms tend to be
double-edged, at once upholding the larger infrastructure of the status quo
while providing limited opportunities for episodic challenges and transforma-
tions in that ruling order.3
Such study of how law matters for social movements is infinitely more complex,
mixed, variable, and contingent than can be captured in simple position state-
ments.4
Moreover, little effort to develop generalizable theoretical frameworks for un-
derstanding social movement engagements with law in comparative perspective has
informed much of the recent study. Both the legal mobilization approach grounded
in political process models of social movements and judicial impact studies his-
torically have emphasized the systematic study of sociopolitical context as essen-
tial. Theorizing by social movement scholars—from resource mobilization and
3
See also Scheingold (1974), Rosenberg (1991), McCann (1998), and Lovell & McCann
(2004).
4
“Hence although law in the aggregate surely tends to support hierarchical power relations,
analysis should be attentive to the variability of legal conventions and practices within
different contexts. In particular, we should be sensitive to how different legal norms and
institutional arenas over time offer varying degrees of opportunity or space for creative
challenge. . . . This is the primary thrust of the decentered view of law advanced here:
not only that law is pluralistic and relatively independent of the state, but that its role in
sustaining traditional hierarchies, and hence in structuring potential strategies of resistance,
varies significantly among different terrains of social struggle” (McCann 1994, pp. 9–10).
20 MCCANN
political process models to theorizing about new social movements, framing theory,
and concepts of contentious politics—has provided catalysts to continued develop-
ment of socio-legal theory. However, although some legal scholars borrow from and
dabble in social movement theory, few are concerned about theoretical develop-
ment. The general debate between legal optimists and pessimists has hardly encour-
aged development of comparative analytical theory. Scholars focusing on cause
lawyering have provided many interesting new case studies and insights, but they
too generally have contributed little to theory building about movement dynamics.
Finally, many of the more recent studies build on relatively narrow but unar-
ticulated conceptions of law, mostly focusing on litigation outcomes and the roles
of lawyers. Old debates about whether lawyers are privileged elites or effective
grassroots allies, whether courts can be relied on to respond to marginal voices,

and the like continue to thrive. Again, position-taking tends to occlude attention
to variation and contingency, and analyses cabining law to litigation, lawyers, and
case law talk past and mischaracterize other more expansive understandings of law
as cultural norms that have a life in resistances to and transformative mobilization
apart from, and often at odds with, mainstream elite constructions of law. The
point is not that there is a single correct or best framework for understanding law,
but rather that much scholarship is committed to making claims about law without
clearly thinking through the complex, multiple dimensions of what often are rec-
ognized as law and legality. The result is more heat than light, in this author’s view.
These deficiencies and differences in the literature pose a daunting challenge
for a review essay on scholarship about law and social movements. My solution
is to draw on one approach to organize my review of the disparate arguments and
insights advanced by other scholars. The general legal mobilization approach best
serves the purpose for at least four reasons. It is (a) the most expansive and synthetic
approach, thus facilitating organized integration of different contributions; (b) the
most extensively grounded in social movement theory, building on political process
models but adding other elements from other theories; (c) least committed to a
simple view about the role of law in social movements, adopting instead a tragic
view about law’s considerable constraints and limited opportunities that vary with
context; and (d) most adaptable by scholars outside the United States working in
comparative and transnational studies (see O’Brien 1996, Keck & Sikkink 1998,
Rajagopal 2003, Diamant et al. 2005, Santos & Rodriguez 2005, Shin 2006). Astute
readers might also recognize that this general approach shamelessly draws most
on my own scholarship, which means I am also least likely to misrepresent its aims
and logic.
LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: DEFINING CONCEPTS

Conceptualizing Law
Much of the diversity in assessing how law matters for social movements de-
rives from quite divergent ways of understanding and studying law itself. Most
generally, we use the term law to signify different types of phenomena. We refer
sometimes to official legal institutions, like courts or administrative bureaucra-
cies; sometimes to legal officials or elites, such as judges, bureaucrats, or lawyers;
and sometimes to legal norms, rules, or discourses that structure practices in and
beyond official legal institutions (Thompson 1975). Most recent studies grant at-
tention to all three usages, although in somewhat unclear or unsystematic ways.
Legal realists and behavioralists, for example, tend to identify law primarily in
instrumental, determinate, positivist terms. Law, in this account, matters to the de-
gree that official institutional actions cause direct, immediate, tangible effects on
targeted behaviors (Rosenberg 1991, Bogart 2002). Measured by such a standard,
legal institutions and officials often appear to provide powerful support for the
status quo but feeble sources for challenging the prevailing order. Legal scholars
who focus on lawyers, litigation, and judicial impact tend toward this approach,
even when addressing how legal action does or does not inspire movements. This
instrumentalist/realist perspective tends to privilege judgments and debates about
whether law is or is not useful for movements.
By contrast, interpretive, process-oriented legal mobilization approaches are
typically much more expansive in conceptualizing law, especially regarding the
legal norms and discursive logics at stake in many social struggles. The interpre-
tive perspective begins by rejecting conventional positivist understandings of law
largely limited to discrete, determinate rules or policy actions and policy actors.
Rather, law is understood as particular traditions of knowledge and communicative
practice. The focus is not simply on behavior but on the intersubjective power of
law in constructing meaning. As such, attention is directed to how legal discourses
and symbols intersect with and are expressive of broader ideological formations
within societies (Hunt 1990, McCann 1994, McCann & March 1996). Attention
to legal meanings does not necessarily preclude instrumental considerations about
effects or impacts of litigation, lawyers, and courts, but the latter are not the ex-
clusive or even primary focus of inquiry. Indeed, most legal mobilization studies
focus on the legal naming, blaming, and claiming by social movement activists in
spaces where the shadows of official law and actors are often quite dim.
Such an understanding of law as knowledge and linguistic practice calls atten-
tion to law’s power as a constitutive convention of social life (Brigham 1996). This
constitutive power is ambiguous. On the one hand, legal knowledges to some de-
gree shape, or prefigure, the identities and practical activities of subjects in society.
Learned legal conventions mold the very terms of citizen understanding, expec-
tation, and interaction with others. Law thus is a significant part of how we learn
to live and act as citizens in society. Legal constructs shape our very capacities
to imagine social or political possibilities. Among the most important of liberal
legal conventions constituting both national and transnational relations are what
we call rights—those legal forms that designate the distribution of legitimate social
entitlements and burdens among citizens.
On the other hand, law is also understood to be a resource that citizens utilize to
structure relations with others, to advance goals in social life, to formulate rightful
22 MCCANN
claims, and to negotiate disputes where interests, wants, or principles collide. Legal
knowledges thus can matter as both ends and means of action; law provides both
normative principles and strategic resources for the conduct of social struggle.
Indeed, this is the core meaning of what many scholars label legal mobilization:
“Law is mobilized when a desire or want is translated into an assertion of right
or lawful claim” (Zemans 1983). Most such specific legal claims refer, of course,
to settled, relatively uncontested entitlements. But at other times citizens interpret
laws in different ways, reconstructing law in the process to fit shifting visions of
need and circumstance; we reconstitute to some degree the law that constitutes
us. In this sense, legal conventions are understood as a quite plastic and malleable
medium, routinely employed to reconfigure relations, redefine entitlements, and

formulate aspirations for collective living. The concept of rights consciousness—

as a developing understanding of social relations in terms of rights—has been
particularly important for analysis of law and social movements throughout the
world (McCann 1994, Marshall 2003).
This indeterminacy or plasticity of legal conventions is limited, of course. Legal
practices carry with them their own inherent constraints on what is accepted as
legally sensible or compelling, whereas governing authorities often impose even
tighter constraints on accepted meaning through organized force. Official institu-
tions function to police the range of law’s legitimate meanings, to enforce bound-
aries on those meanings, and to use selectively organized violence against those
who violate official readings of law or who are outside law’s inherent protections.
But law also thrives outside of such direct police power intervention, and outside
of courtrooms in particular, where official legal meanings rule only indirectly as a
possibility of intervening force to settle disputes or enforce particular legal prac-
tices. Indeed, this possibility, either implicit or explicitly threatened, that official
third parties (such as judges or police) might intervene tends to shape social in-
teraction and bargaining relations far more than actual direct official interventions
(Galanter 1983).
It is law’s complex life throughout society—within workplaces, corporate board-
rooms, neighborhoods, and communities and throughout institutionalized public
spaces of national and transnational politics—under the shadow of official rule
on which most conflict-based, process-oriented studies of law and social move-
ments focus attention. Indeed, the primary project of legal mobilization analysis
is aimed at the constitutive role of legal rights both as a strategic resource and
as a constraint, as a source of empowerment and disempowerment, for strug-
gles to transform, or to reconstitute, the terms of social relations and power (see
Scheingold 1989, Silverstein 1996). This understanding is especially important
for appreciating the increasing power of human rights norms around the world,
within polities and transnational or international arenas where authoritative legal
institutions are often underdeveloped or contested.
One more aspect of law fills out the picture. In short, most scholars in the
process-oriented, constitutive approach presume that law is a partial and contin-
gent force in society. This calls attention, on the one hand, to the fact that legal
tactics of social movements are usually coordinated with other political tactics
such as legislative lobbying, partisan electoral advocacy, media campaigns, infor-
mation disclosure, or public protest. Indeed, much study emphasizes that litigation
and other official legal actions are most commonly and effectively utilized as a
secondary or supplementary political strategy in social movement struggles. Sim-
ilarly, this literature emphasizes that lawyers often are not only, or even primarily,
litigators; they negotiate, counsel, coordinate, and even sometimes work to educate
and mobilize movement constituents and resources (McCann & Silverstein 1998).
The legalistic, litigation-obsessed propensities of some lawyers thus can divert or
drain movement energies, but this is hardly always the case. On the other hand, the
legal mobilization approach recognizes as well that legal conventions constitute

just one of the many variable types of norms that govern and give meaning to so-
cial life. This suggests that any assessment of specific legal mobilization practices
by social movements must be undertaken with reference to the larger context of
multiple legal and extralegal norms or discourses that structure social relations.
Social Movements
The core term “social movements” is defined in quite variable ways by scholars,
including by specialists on the topic. Tilly’s (1984, p. 306) definition is as useful
as any. A social movement is
a sustained series of interactions between powerholders and persons success-
fully claiming to speak on behalf of a constituency lacking formal represen-
tation, in the course of which those persons make publicly visible demands
for changes in the distribution or exercise of power, and back those demands
with public demonstrations of support.
The problem with this definition is that it does not clearly distinguish social
movements from interest groups, minority political parties, protesting mobs, civil
disobedience, terrorist violence, and other forms of collective action. Scholarly
efforts have been made to differentiate social movements by what they want,
whom they represent, and what tactics they use—but few such efforts are entirely
successful at an abstract level. The dilemma is exacerbated, further, by the fact
that the organization and activities of what we call social movements often overlap
with, grow out of, or transform into other forms of organization over time in
complex, elusive ways. Indeed, frustrations over defining the boundaries of the
term social movements have led several leading scholars to abandon the concept
for the broader, more inclusive label of contentious politics (McAdam et al. 2001).
Despite these caveats, however, I limit the range of activity referred to as social
movements for the purposes of this review. Social movement activity here is iden-
tified broadly with social struggles of a particular type. First, social movements
aim for a broader scope of social and political transformation than do other more
conventional political activities. Although social movements may press for tangi-
ble short-term goals within the existing structure of relations, they are animated by
24 MCCANN
more radical aspirational visions of a different, better society. Second, social move-
ments often employ a wide range of tactics, as do parties and interest groups, but
they are far more prone to rely on communicative strategies of information disclo-
sure and media campaigns as well as disruptive symbolic tactics such as protests,
marches, strikes, and the like that halt or upset ongoing social practices. One of
the surprising findings of much research is that litigation and other seemingly
conventional legal tactics sometimes can be fused with such disruptive forms of
political expression. Law sometimes serves disorder as well as order (Lowi 1971).
Litigation can provide a form of, or forum for, rebellion (Meranto 1998) as well
as a lethal weapon in social conflict (Turk 1976).
Third, social movements tend to develop from core constituencies of nonelites

whose social position reflects relatively low degrees of wealth, prestige, or politi-
cal clout. Although movements may find leadership or alliance among elites and
powerful organizations, the core indigenous population of social movements tends
to be “the nonpowerful, the nonwealthy and the nonfamous” (Zirakzadeh 1997).
It is worth noting that this definition can include reactionary or highly conserva-
tive as well as progressive or left-leaning movements, although the overwhelming
amount of academic study concerns the latter groups. Fourth, the discussion below
includes traditional modernist social movements focusing on class relations and
material politics as well as new (or postmodern) social movements that empha-
size a broad range of principled social justice commitments, including especially
human rights (Beuchler & Cylke 1997). Lastly, this review addresses social move-
ments that develop within particular nations, generally focused on states as targets
or means of transforming societies, as well as transnational movements for human
rights, environmental change, peace, and the like. Studies of transnational activism
have developed rapidly in recent years and tend to rely on dynamic process-based
approaches similar to those emphasized here (Keck & Sikkink 1998, Santos &
Rodriguez-Garavito 2005). Indeed, cooperation among transnational and domes-
tic national social movements on human rights issues is one of the most important
manifestations of contemporary legal mobilization politics (Sarat & Scheingold
2001).
LEGAL PRACTICES OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS:

A BROADLY PROCESS-BASED OVERVIEW
With these general understandings in mind, we can now review some of the insights
generated by scholars about law and social movements. The legal mobilization
approach in particular envisions social disputing or struggles as processes that
involve different moments or stages of development and conflict. This discussion
of law’s workings in various social movements proceeds by focusing on potential
stages of conflict. At each stage, I attempt to give examples of instances in which
legal tactics and practices have proved empowering as well as disempowering for
various movements.
I must emphasize at the outset, however, that legal practices or mobilization

activities rarely are imposed as exogenous or alien forces on social relations. So-
cial terrains of struggle themselves are always constituted by a complex array of
institutional norms, relations, and structures of power, including in most cases
legally authorized norms backed up by the violence of individual states, coalitions
of states, or transnational institutions like the United Nations. Hence, legal mo-
bilization politics typically involves reconstructing legal dimensions of inherited
social relations, either by turning official but ignored legal norms against exist-
ing practices, by reimagining shared norms in new, transformative ways, or by
importing legal norms from some other authoritative source into the context of
the dispute. Again, law often significantly supports prevailing social relations as
well as provides limited resources for challenging those relationships. This is one
point on which virtually all scholars agree. Social movement struggles often entail
struggles over the very meaning of indeterminate, contradictory legal principles.
Finally, law’s meanings and constitutive force vary dramatically with different
contexts. One major preoccupation of scholars is in identifying those factors inter-
nal and external to law that shape its relative significance. Scholars who focus on
top-down approaches to judicial impact outline the variables that most influence
the force of court decisions (Rosenberg 1991, Canon & Johnson 1998). Similarly,
scholars who focus on process-based approaches to studying law in social move-
ments emphasize various contextual factors. Opportunity structures, movement
resources, and discursive terrains or legal consciousness are familiar organizing
categories for such analyses. Some of the most interesting and important contribu-
tions of scholarship on social movements derive from this attention. Unfortunately,
however, limited space does not permit discussion of these issues in the remaining
pages of this essay. The best remedy for these important omissions is to read the
leading original studies themselves.
Law and the Genesis of Social Movements

Perhaps the most significant point at which law matters for many social movements
is during the earliest phases of organizational and agenda formation. The core in-
sight has been expressed by Scheingold’s (1974) well-known argument regarding
the “politics of rights” (p. 131). As he put it, it is possible for marginalized groups
“to capitalize on the perceptions of entitlement associated with (legal) rights to ini-
tiate and to nurture political mobilization.” This process of what is conventionally
labeled “rights consciousness raising” can be understood to involve two separate,
if often intimately related, processes of cognitive transformation in movement
constituents.
The first of these cognitive transformations entails the process of agenda setting
by which movement actors draw on legal discourses to name and to challenge ex-
isting social wrongs or injustices. As such, legal norms and traditions can become
important elements in the process of explaining how existing relationships are
unjust, in defining collective group goals, and in constructing a common identity
26 MCCANN
among diversely situated citizens (Schneider 1986, McCann 1994). “One of the
main tasks that social movements undertake . . . is to make possible the previously
unimaginable, by framing problems in such a way that their solution comes to
appear inevitable,” note Keck & Sikkink (1998, pp. 40–41). Some scholars em-
phasize ways in which sense of injury and political challenge are formulated in
legal terms from the outset, while yet others emphasize the process of translation
from nonlegal grievances to legal claims (M. Paris, unpublished manuscript). In
either case, scholars emphasize how the very identities, interests, and ideals of
movement activists can be constituted by, or even against, law (Brigham 1996).
A second related way in which legal practices can contribute to movement
building is by reconstructing the overall opportunity structure within which move-

ments develop (Anderson 2005). This insight draws on the common scholarly
premise that movement formation and action are more likely in periods when
dominant groups and state-authorized relationships are perceived as vulnerable to
challenge (Piven & Cloward 1979, McAdam 1982). Advances through formal legal
advocacy—and especially through high-profile litigation—many times have con-
tributed to this sense of vulnerability among both state and nonstate authorities. In
particular, judicial victories can impart salience or legitimacy to general categories
of claims, such as equal rights, as well as to specific formulations of challenges
within these broad legal traditions (Scheingold 1974, Burstein & Monaghan 1986,
Burstein 1991a,b, Silverstein 1996). Indeed, many scholars have noted a sort of
contagion effect generated by rights litigation over the past 40 years in the United
States (Tarrow 1983, Epp 1998), by legal rights mobilization increasingly in other
regions such as the European Union (Cichowski 2002), and by human rights advo-
cacy around the world (Keck & Sikkink 1998). There is some evidence that legal
mobilization often succeeds in movement building because the mass media tend
to be particularly responsive to rights claims and litigation campaigns for social
justice, although this evidence is primarily limited to the U.S. experience (McCann
1994, Haltom 1998) and is contested even there (Rosenberg 1991). It is also worth
noting that such opportunities for mobilization typically define just one of several
potential venues for activity, each of which may vary widely in its promise. More-
over, opportunities often carry with them significant constraining or disciplining
logics whereby legal action requires moderation of claims, narrowing of demands,
or forfeiting of other tactics. The history of U.S. labor activism exemplifies this
point well (Forbath 1991), as do the legacies of labor struggle, gay and lesbian
rights advocacy (Cain 1993, Anderson 2005), and other modes of human rights
advocacy (Dezalay & Garth 2001) in various regions of the world.
These two dimensions of legal activism typically are interrelated in social move-
ment development. For example, formal legal actions like litigation can work ini-
tially to expose systemic vulnerabilities and to render legal claims sensible or
salient to aggrieved citizens. As marginalized groups act on these opportunities,
they often gain sophistication and confidence in their capacity to mobilize legal
conventions to name wrongs, to direct blame, to frame demands, and to advance
their cause. When citizens “begin to assert their ‘rights’ that imply demands for
change,” Piven & Cloward (1979) noted long ago, there often develops “a new
sense of efficacy; people who ordinarily consider themselves helpless come to
believe that they have some capacity to alter their lot” (p. 4).
This complex process of legal catalysis was illustrated by the U.S. civil rights
movement in the 1950s. A program of litigation leading up to the famous 1954
Brown v. Board of Education decision was vital to the evolving civil rights move-
ment in two ways. First, it sparked southern blacks’ hopes by demonstrating that
the southern white power structure was vulnerable at some points and by providing
scarce practical resources for defiant action (Glennon 1991). Second, the increas-
ing pressure on the southern white power structure to abolish racial domination
led to a massive, highly visible attack—including legal assaults as well as physi-

cal violence—on the formal black leadership group, the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). These reactions in turn forced a
split between local NAACP leaders urging more radical forms of protest action
and the more bureaucratic, legally oriented leaders of the national organization.
The result was a burst in both the momentum of the grassroots protest campaign
among southern blacks generally and their frustration about the effectiveness of
legal tactics alone. “The two approaches—legal action and mass protest—entered
into a turbulent but workable marriage” (Morris 1984, p. 39; see also Polletta
1994). Moreover, the resulting escalation of conflicts between whites and blacks
on both fronts expanded the scope of the dispute to include Washington officials,
federal courts, the northern media, and national public opinion. Court decisions
alone thus did not cause, by moral inspiration, defiant black grassroots action or,
by coercion, federal support for the civil rights agenda. Critics like Rosenberg
(1991) are correct in making this narrow claim. But legal tactics pioneered by the
NAACP figured very prominently in the ongoing process of elevating civil rights
claims and intensifying the initial terms of racial struggle in the South.
Similar dynamics have been evident in the movements for the rights of the
disabled, gay rights, animal rights, and women’s rights in the United States. These
examples are especially interesting because they demonstrate that conclusive, far-
reaching victories in courts or other official forums are not necessary to achieve
this legal catalyzing effect. The wage equity issue in the United States, for exam-
ple, largely developed in response to the limitations of traditional court-approved
affirmative action policies for remedying discrimination against women workers
locked into segregated jobs. After a string of defeats in the 1970s, the wage eq-
uity movement won a small victory in wage discrimination law at the Supreme
Court level and one pathbreaking lower court ruling, which later was overturned
on appeal. But in the five-year interim between the first and the last of these three
rulings, movement leaders effectively used legal actions—despite doctrinal case
law limitations—to organize women workers in hundreds of workplaces around
the nation. A massive publicity campaign focusing on court victories initially put
the issue on the national agenda and alerted leaders that wage equity was the work-
ing women’s issue of the 1980s. Lawsuits were then filed on behalf of working
women as the centerpiece of a successful union and movement organizing strategy
28 MCCANN
in scores of local venues around the nation. Again, the evidence suggests not that
court decisions worked to enlighten working women about their subordination, as
sometimes is claimed. Rather, sustained legal action over time worked to render
employers vulnerable to challenge, to expand the resources available to work-
ing women, to provide them a unifying claim of egalitarian rights, and to increase
both their confidence and sophistication in advancing those claims (McCann 1994).
Other scholars more recently have expanded on such insights in important ways by
drawing on concepts of movement legal “framing” developed by social scientists
(Marshall 2003, Pedriana 2004).
These latter insights are particularly relevant to appreciating the considerable
power of human rights advocacy in defining challenges to authoritarian regimes.

Indeed, framing social issues as human rights issues has often been quite effective
and empowering for movement mobilization. Abel (1995) has shown how “speak-
ing law to power” provided a potent orienting frame for mobilizing challenges to
apartheid in South Africa. The enterprise of renaming women’s rights as human
rights, and specifically of challenging female circumcision as violence against
women, has redefined the symbolic terrain of struggle and mobilized support by
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for women’s issues around the globe in
recent decades (Keck & Sikkink 1998). There is also evidence that rights advocacy,
often supplemented by litigation or other legal tactics, has generated considerable
movement-building impetus in the European Union (Cichowski 2002), various
parts of Latin America (Santos 1995, Cleary 1997, Meili 2001), and East Asia
(O’Brien 1996, Diamant et al. 2005, Shin 2006).
Legal action often fails as a resource for expanding social movement activism,
of course, largely owing to the absence of favorable social conditions. Extra-legal
social factors undermined to some degree various environmental justice campaigns
and actions for the poor or homeless (Harris 2004) in the United States. Many labor
rights campaigns against the sweatshop conditions of U.S.-owned factories in
developing countries and human rights campaigns against authoritarian violence,
such as the massacre of protesting students in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Plaza
and in Central Europe (Keck & Sikkink 1998), have proved similarly limited in
capacity to mobilize strong movement support and public attention. Feminists in
Israel likewise were unable to use notable victories in the Israeli High Court of
Justice as effective grassroots mobilizing resources (Woods 2001).
Moreover, legal tactics have arguably worked sometimes to discourage, thwart,
or contain social movement development. For example, the successful litigation
represented by Brown clearly anchored the civil rights movement on a narrow
desegregationist track, marginalizing black leaders with quite different visions of
justice and transformation (Anderson 2003) and arguably containing or co-opting
the possibilities of movement development. One common critique is that legal
tactics divert resources to lawyers who focus on litigation rather than on grass-
roots mobilization and other forms of potentially more effective political organiz-
ing (Scheingold 1974, McCann & Silverstein 1998). There is some limited evi-
dence for this tendency for particular struggles in many countries (McCann 1986,
Rosenberg 1992, Morag-Levine 2001, Brown-Nagin 2005) as well as for the thesis
that lawyers are often co-opted or constrained by the elite institutional relations
in which they are enmeshed (Handler 1978). Dezalay & Garth’s (2001) argument
about the containment of human rights lawyers’ agendas in Latin America re-
sulting from their dependence on U.S. foundations and target states identifies an
especially sobering pattern of constraints in this regard.
Legal Mobilization as Political Pressure

Other dimensions of social movement activity involve a common legal dynamic.
In particular, legal advocacy often provides movement activists a source of in-

stitutional and symbolic leverage against opponents. This coercive, adversarial

dimension of legal mobilization in many ways is the flip side of its generative
or consensus-building capacities. As in movement-building efforts, this second
dimension of legal mobilization often but not always entails some measure of liti-
gation or other formal legal action. In fact, we shall see that triumph in the courts
is not always necessary to either short- or long-term successful legal leveraging.
This is hardly a pathbreaking insight, of course, for it has been the primary focus
of related studies on judicial impact (Rosenberg 1991, Canon & Johnson 1998,
Bogart 2002). The uses of legal tactics and threats to compel informal resolution
of everyday private disputes regarding divorce settlement, contractual obligations,
liability for property damages, and the like are familiar to legal scholars (Galanter
1983). However, the complex dialectical relationship between formal and infor-
mal legal action in social movement politics has generally received less scholarly
attention (but see Handler 1978, Olson 1984, Silverstein 1996).
There are several ways in which litigation offers formidable tactical leverage
for social policy advocates. For one thing, institutions and groups targeted by re-
formers often are well aware that litigation can impose substantial costs in terms
of both direct expenditures and long-term financial burdens. Indeed, court costs in
major public disputes—over race and gender discrimination, unsafe workplaces,
or environmental damage, for example—may run in the millions of dollars and can
tie up economically vital operations for years. More important, powerful public
and private interests typically fear losing control of decision-making autonomy—
whether concerning capital investment, wage policy, externalized costs, or the
like—to outside parties such as judges. Hence, they have a stake in cutting po-
tential losses by negotiated settlements of conflicts directly with reform activists.
Finally, one should not discount the symbolic normative power of rights claims
themselves. Because populations around the world increasingly are responsive to
rights claims, defiant groups often can mobilize legal norms, conventions, and
demands to compel concessions even in the absence of clear judicial or other offi-
cial support (Scheingold 1974, 1989; Handler 1978). Again, media propensities to
publicize legal rights claims, especially when taken to official tribunes and linked
to dramatic information disclosure, can magnify the public power of legal mobi-
lization pressure tactics in many settings (McCann 1994, Keck & Sikkink 1998).
30 MCCANN
The implicit promise at stake here is that political struggles may advance more
quickly, cheaply, and effectively when conducted in the shadow of favorable legal
norms and threats of judicial intervention. Such legal gambits are hardly costless
guarantees of success for social reformers, of course. Initiating legal action often
does not generate concessions from powerful opponents, and thus may commit
movement supporters to long, costly, high-risk legal proceedings that they can
afford far less than their institutional foes. Even more important, eventual de-
feat in official forums can sap movement morale, undercut movement bargaining
power, and exhaust movement resources. Consequently, legal leveraging is most
successful when it works as an unfulfilled threat, but activists must be willing to
follow through occasionally with action or lose considerable clout. In any case,
the symbolic manifestations of law, as both a source of moral right and threat of
potential outside intervention, invest rights discourse with its most fundamental
social power.
It stands to reason that legal leveraging practices tend to depend on the existence
of independent judiciaries or other official legal institutions, rules granting standing
for legal action by relevant social movement groups, and a well-developed sup-
port structure of lawyers, organizations, and financial resources for legal advocacy
(McCann 1994, Epp 1998). These conditions have long existed to some degree in
the United States, especially with the proliferation of public interest law firms and
cause lawyers in the post–World War II era. Many other nations have traditionally
possessed some but not all of these elements. For example, many nations have na-
tional courts and constitutions, but those judiciaries often lack independence and,
partially as a result, strong networks of legal advocates for opposition movements
(Epp 1998). However, formal institutional structures, access to rights advocates,
and networks of support for legal mobilization have proliferated across the globe
at both national and transnational levels. The explosion of human rights, environ-
mental, peace, and indigenous people’s NGOs and cause lawyers along with the
growth of regional (European Court of Justice) and international (World Court,
United Nations) adjudicatory institutions has facilitated the rise of legal leveraging
as a key tactic of social movement politics around the globe (Sarat & Scheingold
2001). Most notably, as Keck & Sikkink (1998) demonstrate, transnational hu-
man rights organizations often ally with domestic groups to produce boomerang
pressures for change that effectively bypass traditional forms of state resistance.
As noted above, the deployment of legal resources to pressure dominant groups
takes place at different points of movement struggles. I address two types of in-
strumental leverage here.
Generating Responsive Action

One phase of many struggles entails using legal tactics in an effort to generate
responsiveness to basic policy demands, or at least some partial concessions, by
the state or other authority. Silverstein (1996) has demonstrated how this tactic has
generated some relatively important effects by the U.S. animal rights movement
in recent years. In a variety of instances, she illustrates, litigation has been used
to dramatize abuses of animals, to embarrass particular institutional actors, and to
win favorable media attention. When carefully coordinated with demonstrations
and other media events, high-profile litigation worked as a double-barreled threat,
at once mobilizing public opinion against targeted abusers and threatening costly
legal proceedings and possible defeats in court. Overall, such legal tactics have
proved to be one of the movement’s most effective modes of forcing change by state
and nonstate authorities alike. Paris (unpublished manuscript) and Reed (2001)
have separately demonstrated a similar dynamic in the very different state-level
campaign for egalitarian school finance reform in the United States.
Such examples confirm again some often overlooked aspects of legal leveraging
tactics. For one thing, these cases illustrate that repeated clear victories in courts
or other official institutions are not necessary to effective legal mobilization. In
some successful struggles, lawsuits have failed to generate appellate decisions di-
rectly authorizing many of the new rights and remedies that activists sought. The
ability to win at least some small advances on related issues and to win a hearing
in court for major claims often poses enough actual costs (bad publicity, legal
fees) and potential risks (of judicially imposed policies) to pressure opponents
into making significant concessions (Frymer 2003). Moreover, the very framing
of issues in terms of rights can transform debates and add weight to claims. It is
important to underline again, however, that legal tactics tend to be most useful in
concert with other tactics, such as public demonstrations, legislative lobbying, col-
lective bargaining, electoral mobilization, and media publicity. The fact that legal
norms and institutional maneuvers constitute only one dimension of movement
strategy complicates evaluation of their discrete contributions, to be sure. But,
in each movement noted above, both activists and specific case histories confirm
the importance of such contingent, secondary legal actions. Other notable exam-
ples of such legal leveraging dynamics could be cited from the environmentalist,
consumer, women’s rights, wage equity rights, civil rights, and disability rights
movements in the United States.
Legal leveraging is often different and difficult in nations with less independent
and powerful courts than in the United States. However, such tactics have generated
influence for women’s rights movements in specific European nations (Epp 1998),
in the European Union (Cichowski 2002), in Latin America (Keck & Sikkink
1998, Santos & Rodriguez 2005), in East Asia (Diamant et al. 2005, Shin 2006),
and in Israel (Woods 2001), Egypt (Moustafa 2003), Iran (Osanloo 2002), and
other Middle Eastern nations. Human rights activity and litigation have provided
a notable force for challenging authoritarian rule in Latin America, South Africa,
Egypt, and other nations as well. Indeed, groups like Amnesty International and
broader networks of rights activists have changed the whole calculus of politics
within and between nations. Feldman (2000) has demonstrated in similar fashion
how both rights and legal mobilization efforts have had great impact even in Japan,
a nation where independent courts and cause lawyers traditionally have not played
a major role in public policy.
32 MCCANN
Important examples of when legal tactics either have failed to generate or

even have impeded progressive change are notable as well, however. The abortion
case arguably offers a revealing legacy. Although U.S. feminists won support for
women’s right to choose in Roe v. Wade, the provision of both medical services
and financial aid to pay for exercising those rights did not materialize to any great
degree. What is more, Roe became the focus of a significant conservative coun-
termovement bent on denying, or at least substantially restricting, the capacity of
women to choose the abortion option (Rosenberg 1991). In short, legal tactics not
only failed to leverage real change; they arguably undermined the potential for
change that alternative tactics might have produced (but see Lemieux 2004). Simi-
lar patterns of failed campaigns can be seen in response to legal mobilization efforts
around the globe, especially in places lacking strong legal traditions, institutions,
and support structures of organized activists. Coglianese (2001) argues that the en-
vironmental movement was co-opted by bureaucratic processes and lost its critical,
transformative vision in large part owing to its legalistic strategies. Morag-Levine
(2001) has shown how litigation-focused, rights-oriented approaches imported
from the United States fail, and actually divert effective politics, in more corpo-
ratist political contexts such as in Israel. Finally, rights-based legal mobilization
efforts have generated backlashes in virtually every part of the world, including the
United States, where social movements have attempted to challenge hierarchical
social power and authoritarian state rule.
Policy Implementation and Enforcement

Legal leveraging often figures prominently at the policy implementation stage of
political struggles as well. This is important, for gaining acceptance of new laws
or policies on the books without effective policy implementation accomplishes
little. And it is at this stage that many scholars, with some justification, have
contended that legal tactics are most limited in significance. The most common
explanation for these constraints is that both national and transnational courts
generally lack the independence and resources to enforce their decisions against
recalcitrant groups in government and society (Scheingold 1974, Handler 1978,
McCann 1986, Rosenberg 1991).
Nevertheless, legal mobilization studies have provided some useful insights into
how law can and sometimes does matter for struggles over policy implementation.
In particular, a host of empirical inquiries have documented how legal tactics—
and especially actual or threatened litigation—can help movement activists to win
voice, position, and influence in the process of reform policy implementation,
whether sanctioned by state or nonstate authorities. These include policy areas
regarding the environment, gender and race discrimination, and the rights of the
disabled, among others in the United States. There is evidence for similar dynamics
in the European Union and in various nations around the world, but the politics of
legal leveraging at implementation has been studied rather less than other stages
of social movement activity.
Law is often especially important to one specific aim of many outsider groups—
that of formalizing policy formulation and implementation processes. Formality,
as understood here, refers to the degree to which relations are conducted accord-
ing to procedures and standards that are public, general, explicit, and uniform
(Lowi 1971). The core premise at stake here is that dominant groups tend to
prefer relatively insular (autonomous or hidden) modes of discretionary policy
implementation unhampered by standardized procedures, substantive guidelines,
transparency, and outside supervision. In such informal settings, established pre-
rogatives of powerful elites can more easily prevail to minimize costs, maintain
control, and protect their own privileges while granting empty symbolic gestures
to challengers. By contrast, marginalized groups often can benefit from more for-
malized processes in which specified procedural rights and substantive standards

can be employed to render accountable dominant interests who control the bulk of
material and organizational resources (Delgado et al. 1985).
Social movement groups often use litigation specifically to create such formal
institutional access to state power or other institutions as well as to apply pressure
to make that access consequential. In this way, legal resources may provide a se-
ries of more refined tools—basic procedures, standards, and practices—along with
blunt leveraging tactics for shaping the structure of ongoing administrative rela-
tions at the remedial stage of struggles over policy (Galanter 1983). For example,
Edelman (1990) has demonstrated how employers routinely established in-house
offices to avoid litigation and maintain an appearance of good faith compliance
with race-based affirmative action principles in the United States during the 1970s.
Although initially established for largely deceptive or defensive purposes, such of-
fices occasionally mobilized antidiscrimination norms and the specter of litigation
to force real changes from within many corporate and state institutions. In many
nations, this concern for formality likewise has led human rights and other activists
to work for increased independence of courts, of judicial appointments, of the legal
profession, and of procedures identified with the rule of law in an effort to provide
leverage against recalcitrant state and social interests. Indeed, transnational NGOs,
local opposition groups, and judges often form alliances that strengthen courts and
groups alike against authoritarian or undemocratic rule. This process can be seen
in Egypt, Israel, various Latin American nations, and the European Union since
the 1980s, and even to some degree in various historical moments of American
politics.
Of course, as judicial impact studies suggest, legal leveraging may offer as
little to reformers in policy implementation battles as at other stages of struggle
(Handler 1978, Rosenberg 1991). The fact that judges and other legal officials
shrink from cases requiring great technical knowledge and experience may make
leveraging tactics less effective generally at the policy implementation stage. More-
over, openly hostile courts can greatly undercut opportunities and deny resources
in ways that actually disempower movement actors in the policy process. And
even when courts act favorably for disadvantaged groups, injustice in most institu-
tional settings will go unchallenged in the absence of well-organized constituencies
34 MCCANN
willing to mobilize legal resources for change. Indeed, apparent advances in offi-
cial law may add insult to injury for marginalized citizens lacking organizational
resources. In short, law’s relative formality does not always help reformers and may
constitute a considerable constraint on action. Again, understanding these varia-
tions requires analysis of law’s workings within the larger web of social relations
where struggle occurs.
THE LEGACY OF LAW IN/FOR STRUGGLE

A final dimension of movement activity requires the most complex, subtle, and
unique reflections both about law and about social change. This can be labeled the
legacy phase. It concerns the aftermath of movement struggles for people, rela-
tionships, and institutions throughout society. Legacies surely include movement
agents and targets of specified policy reform actions, but they can include far more
general or unintended implications as well. These latter sorts of implications are
the least studied aspect of law and change, so I rely heavily on my own research
to illustrate very briefly my point.
In my own studies of wage equity in over a dozen organizational settings in the
United States, I found that the direct and tangible policy accomplishments were
modest but important (McCann 1994). While women’s jobs were accorded rather
less than full equity, women often received increases of 10% to 25% in their wages.
But interviews with women revealed that the increases were not the only, or even the
most important, gain. Rather, women workers repeatedly reported matters of what
we might call workplace empowerment. They testified that their individual sense
of efficacy as citizens was greatly enhanced and that their identification with other
women workers had been increased markedly. The latter was related to a growth
in the organizational power of women within their unions and of their unions
relative to their employers. Many women specifically talked about the significance
of increased rights consciousness that resulted from the legal mobilization efforts
around wage equity. The result is that, in most workplaces, the pay equity struggle
quickly gave rise to new issue demands for maternity leave, fringe benefits, job
mobility opportunities, better work conditions, and the like. In short, the very
context of discursive possibility and relational power often was transformed to
some degree.
Such evidence makes it hard to deny that law and legal mobilization activity
made a difference in many people’s lives and institutional situations. At the same
time, my study did not find this same outcome everywhere. In some venues, there
was little clear trace of positive change; in some workplaces, conditions had even
deteriorated and women involved in the earlier struggle had largely given up or
left. Similarly mixed legacies can be traced in the aftermath of the black civil
rights movement, the second wave of women’s rights activism, environmental le-
gal advocacy, prisoner rights advocacy, animal rights, and other movements in
the United States. Yet other movements—including advocacy for gay and lesbian
rights, welfare rights, and rights of the homeless—have found very little at all
to cheer about in the records of legal action. Indeed, legal rights claiming and
appeals to official legal institutions in many cases have generated far more back-
lash or countermobilization from reactionary political forces in the United States
(Rosenberg 1991, Goldberg-Hiller 2002, Haltom & McCann 2004, Dudas 2003,
but also see Lemieux 2004).
It is quite early to assess the legacies of rights-based legal mobilization by
social movements in other parts of the world, but evidence likewise suggests a
wide range of implications. Specific human rights struggles have often generated
considerable drama and transformed the terms of political struggles, but patterns of
significant change in social relations, state power, and material welfare have been
more variable. As noted above, legal mobilization efforts have generated the full
gambit of short-term impacts on social relations, and variability in the longer-term
implications—from transformative legacies to backlash—are only to be expected.
Attention to the backlashes and retrenchment following rights-based movement
struggles defines one of the most important and interesting areas of future inquiry
for socio-legal scholars.
That brings us back to the starting point on which most analysts agree: Legal
mobilization tactics do not inherently empower or disempower citizens. Legal
institutions and norms tend to be Janus-faced, at once securing the status quo of
hierarchical power while sometimes providing limited opportunities for episodic
challenges to and transformations in that reigning order (Scheingold 1974). How
law matters depends on the complex, often changing dynamics of the context in
which struggles occur.
The Annual Review of Law and Social Science is online at

http://lawsocsci.annualreviews.org
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P1: JRX
September 22, 2006 16:57 Annual Reviews AR291-FM
Annual Review of Law and Social Science

Volume 2, 2006
CONTENTS
FRONTISPIECE, Marc Galanter x
IN THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT: LAW, ANTI-LAW, AND SOCIAL

SCIENCE, Marc Galanter 1
LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES,
Michael McCann 17
THE SOCIAL AND LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF SUSPECTS, Simon A. Cole
and Michael Lynch 39
MAX WEBER’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY OF
LAW, Richard Swedberg 61
GOVERNMENTALITY, Nikolas Rose, Pat O’Malley, and Mariana Valverde 83
THE DEATH OF LABOR LAW? Cynthia L. Estlund 105
THE CRIME DROP AND BEYOND, Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman 125
ECONOMIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF CRIME,
Steven D. Levitt and Thomas J. Miles 147
ISLAMIC LAW AND SOCIETY POST-9/11, Susan F. Hirsch 165
FIELDWORK ON LAW, Carol J. Greenhouse 187
NETWORKING GOES INTERNATIONAL: AN UPDATE,
Anne-Marie Slaughter and David Zaring 211
FROM THE COLD WAR TO KOSOVO: THE RISE AND RENEWAL OF THE
FIELD OF INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS, Yves Dezalay
and Bryant Garth 231
EMERGENCY POWERS, William E. Scheuerman 257
THE LAW AND ECONOMICS OF INCOMPLETE CONTRACTS,
Robert E. Scott 279
AFTER POSTCOMMUNISM: THE NEXT PHASE, Martin Krygier
and Adam Czarnota 299
CONSPIRACY IN INTERNATIONAL LAW, Jens Meierhenrich 341
LAW AND THE LABOR MARKET, Christine Jolls 359
TRANSNATIONAL LEGALITY AND THE IMMOBILIZATION OF LOCAL
AGENCY, David Schneiderman 387

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tex XMLPublishSM (2004/02/24) P1: JRX

Annu. Rev. Law Soc. Sci. 2006. 2:17–38

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS:

Key Words legal mobilization, social justice

elements of social movement organization, activity, and context nor theoretically

at best passing notice to social movement theory.2

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 19

empirical accounts and discourage attention to the complexities, contingencies,

grassroots allies, whether courts can be relied on to respond to marginal voices,

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: DEFINING CONCEPTS

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 21

medium, routinely employed to reconfigure relations, redefine entitlements, and

formulate aspirations for collective living. The concept of rights consciousness—

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 23

legal mobilization approach recognizes as well that legal conventions constitute

Third, social movements tend to develop from core constituencies of nonelites

LEGAL PRACTICES OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS:

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 25

I must emphasize at the outset, however, that legal practices or mobilization

Law and the Genesis of Social Movements

building is by reconstructing the overall opportunity structure within which move-

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 27

led to a massive, highly visible attack—including legal assaults as well as physi-

power of human rights advocacy in defining challenges to authoritarian regimes.

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 29

Legal Mobilization as Political Pressure

In particular, legal advocacy often provides movement activists a source of in-

stitutional and symbolic leverage against opponents. This coercive, adversarial

Generating Responsive Action

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 31

Important examples of when legal tactics either have failed to generate or

Policy Implementation and Enforcement

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 33

malized processes in which specified procedural rights and substantive standards

THE LEGACY OF LAW IN/FOR STRUGGLE

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 35

The Annual Review of Law and Social Science is online at

alization, ed. N Naples, A Desai, pp. 220–38. New York: Longman

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 37

McAdam D, Tarrow S, Tilly C. 2001. Dynamics expansion of constitutional power in Egypt,

of Contention. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge 1980–2001. PhD thesis. Univ. Wash.

Annual Review of Law and Social Science

IN THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT: LAW, ANTI-LAW, AND SOCIAL

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