Legal Mobilization and Social Reform Movements: Notes on Theory and Its Application

Abstract

The dialectical relationship of formal and informal legal action in social reform politics has generally received less scholarly attention. Law is rarely an insular or discrete force in actual social practice, both for judges on the bench and citizens in the street; rather, it is usually only one contingent and interactive, if often important, dimension in the complex mix of factors that structure our choices and actions. It is this pluralistic and contingent character of legal conventions that renders them a dynamic but elusive force structuring social life. The legal mobilization approach emphasizes an understanding of law as identifiable traditions of symbolic practice. The legal mobilization approach urged here likewise gives considerable attention to the indirect—or, in Galanter's terminology, the centrifugal and radiating—effects of official legal action on social struggle. The most commonly acknowledged manifestation of legal mobilization in reform politics concerns its potential contribution to movement building.