This article examines why and how environmental activists, despite considerable political weakness and disproportionally few resources, won substantive negotiating concessions that far outstripped labor achievements during NAFTA's negotiation. Despite a trade policy arena hostile to their demands, environmentalists gained official recognition for the legitimacy of their claims, obtained a seat at the negotiating table, turned a previously technocratic concern into a highly visible populist issue, and won an environmental side agreement stronger than its labor counterpart. We argue that this unexpected outcome is best explained by environmentalists' strategic use of mechanisms available at the intersection of multiple fields. While field theory mainly focuses on interactions within a particular field, we suggest that the structure of overlap between fields—the architecture of field overlap—creates unique points of leverage that render particular targets more vulnerable and certain strategies more effective for activists. We outline the mechanisms associated with the structure of field overlap—alliance brokerage, rulemaking, resource brokerage, and frame adaptation-that enable activists to strategically leverage advantages across fields to transform the political landscape.

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Controversies about constitutional "dialogue" often stem from disagreement over the concept itself. The metaphor's meaning and attendant consequences differ depending on whether it reflects the assumptions of judicial interpretive supremacy or coordinate interpretation. By combining that distinction with the contrast between weak-form and strong-form rights review, this article creates an integrated framework for clarifying dialogic variation across such jurisdictions as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. We apply this framework most intensely to the Canadian case and bring differences between several dialogic forms-especially the difference between "clarification dialogue" and "reconsideration dialogue"-into sharper relief than is common in the literature. The classification of dialogic types revealed by the Canadian experience can, we suggest, illuminate analysis in other jurisdictions.

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