Legal Mobilization

Abstract

Debates about the role and power of law, legal actors, and legal institutions in movements for social change and in politics more broadly have been waged as long as political science has been a discipline. One of the key areas of inquiry in the literature on the role of “things legal” in political systems and society concerns legal mobilization. The term embodies contested academic terrain, since there is no sharply defined or universally accepted meaning. One of the earliest and most-cited formulations put forth in the political science literature is that “the law is . . . mobilized when a desire or want is translated into a demand as an assertion of one’s rights” (see Zemans 1983, cited in Early Works, p. 700). In its narrowest applications, the term refers to high-profile litigation efforts for (or, arguably, against) social change. More broadly, it has been used to describe any type of process by which individual or collective actors invoke legal norms, discourse, or symbols to influence policy, culture, or behavior. Scholarship on legal mobilization has tended to be bifurcated along two lines: individual disputing behavior and group campaigns for social reform. Through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s there was a general trend of political scientists focusing on legal advocacy by group actors, whereas anthropologists and sociologists, particularly those embracing the interpretive turn in the 1980s, focused on the micropolitics of disputes among individuals. However, this changed over the early part of the 21st century with growing cross-disciplinary engagement in terms of theory, methodology, and epistemology. Until the early 21st century, the literature on legal mobilization largely focused on the United States and on implicit (or explicit) assumptions of national judicial exceptionalism: the belief that the American legal and regulatory style and heightened levels of rights consciousness are unparalleled elsewhere in the world. The first two decades of the 21st century saw a steep rise in research on the mobilization of law beyond the United States, with growing interest in the insights that comparative work can generate as well as research on legal mobilization in authoritarian or difficult-to-study settings. There has also been growing interest in transnational and international legal mobilization. This flourishing of work has prodded assumptions derived from the US experience, thereby enhancing our theoretical and empirical understanding of mobilization in different contexts.