Law and Social Movements: An Interdisciplinary Analysis

Abstract

This chapter explores the growing interdisciplinary exchange between law and social science that has led to the emergence of “law and social movements” as a distinctive scholarly field. Its main goal is to examine why this exchange has occurred, what vision of law and social movements it has produced, and what it means for the underlying disciplines. Toward this end, the chapter analyzes how American scholars have seized onto social movements as key actors in legal theory and what this says about ongoing debates within legal scholarship over the role of law as a tool of progressive social change. The chapter then traces the parallel development of legal mobilization within social movement theory, emphasizing the particular construction of law as a resource valued for its indirect effects on movement activism. Doing so reveals how the creation of law and social movements is not simply an interdisciplinary synthesis, but responds to different problems in law and sociology. In law, movements have been used by scholars to present a model of progressive legal reform that promises to reclaim the transformative potential of law while preserving traditional roles for courts and lawyers. In sociology, law has provided a link between movements and institutional politics that helps to explain the professional character and durability of movement organizations without undercutting their claim to outsider status. Both visions, the chapter argues, ultimately respond to barriers to progressive social transformation in democratic societies erected by conservative countermobilization and depend on conceptions of law as a flexible resource deployed to build power and shift culture. The chapter ends by exploring the challenges and opportunities of this interdisciplinary project—pointing out intellectual gaps, while suggesting how greater exchange between legal scholarship and social science might produce deeper understanding of core theoretical concepts and enrich empirical inquiry.