Contesting Scales of Justice: Law and the Geography of the US Antipredatory Lending Movement

Abstract

While the social movements literature has increasingly incorporated sociospatial categories into its conceptual toolkit, this article argues that tracing the concrete ways in which a particular category—"scale"—is mobilized as a stake of political debate helps us refine its workings in practice. Integrating research on the co-constitutive nature of law and political action, this article traces how efforts to pass antipredatory home lending legislation in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s resulted in a rescaled home-lending legal regime. Using judicial and regulatory documents, media accounts, and publications by advocates, government actors, lawyers and the financial industry, I analyze the mechanisms through which this occurred. Debates about federalism, home rule, and preemption illustrate that involved parties attempted to "fix" a legal regime scaled according to their organizational strengths. Finally, this case illustrates how discourses around globalization and economic rationality inform the trajectory of legal debates.