Litigating Change? Social Movements and the Court System

Abstract

Social movement actors increasingly turn to the law and pursue litigation in their efforts to bring about social change. Our article provides an overview of scholarship on collective and politicized litigation, drawing from sociolegal studies, political science, and sociology. We consider scholarship that illuminates why activists turn to litigation tactics in the first place and circumstances in which a social movement litigation strategy can be successful. We also consider additional impacts of movement litigation. Given that social movement researchers in sociology have, to date, paid only limited attention to activist litigation, we encourage scholars in the discipline to investigate further this important form of social movement mobilization.

Realizing the Right to Be Cold? Framing Processes and Outcomes Associated with the Inuit Petition on Human Rights and Global Warming

“…Finally, discursive frames can shape the way in which movement actors engage with the legal system, including their decision to pursue different types of litigation and develop different legal positions and arguments (McCammon et al ; Meyer and Boutcher ; Pedriana ). Litigation provides significant opportunities to generate influential discursive frames that garner media attention and shape the terms and agendas in which legal and policy debates take place (McCammon and McGrath ; McCann , ).…”

“…While we present these two mechanisms as ideal types that operate in isolation, they are intimately connected to one another. For one thing, the articulation and development of a new frame in the context of litigation can simultaneously exert influence on discursive and collective action processes (McCammon and McGrath ). For another, these two framing processes can reinforce one another over time.…”

“…Cable, Mix, and Hastings thus conclude that litigation is disadvantageous for the pursuit of environmental justice “because it requires large amounts of money from people who do not have it, because it is often unsuccessful, because it weakens organizational solidarity, and because even successful litigation does not bring significant rewards” (Cable et al : 61). Although many other socio‐legal scholars share these apprehensions about the limitations of law for social change, they also recognize that litigation has the potential to assist social movements, largely through its effects outside the formal legal system (Marshall ; McCammon and McGrath ; McCann ). In particular, this literature has explored the role that public interest litigation can play in generating interpretative frames that influence the beliefs and perspectives of social movements, lawyers and judges, policymakers, and society as a whole (McCammon et al ; Pedriana ).…”

Lawyers and Embedded Legal Activity in the Southern Civil Rights Movement

“…When scholars examine the role of law in political contention, two broad approaches have historically been taken (for recent reviews of this scholarship, see Boutcher and McCammon forthcoming;McCammon and McGrath 2015;Boutcher and Stobaugh 2013;Edelman, Leachman, and Mcadam 2010). On the one hand, early scholars of law and social movements focused on whether law and legal mobilization by movements are effective means of achieving movement goals.…”

Legal Mobilization and Analogical Legal Framing: Feminist Litigators’ Use of Race–Gender Analogies

“…While this literature is far ranging and goes a long way in helping us understand social movement legal mobilization in the courts, few judicial legal mobilization scholars focus on the particular ways in which activist litigators invoke the law (McCammon and McGrath ). That is, few investigate specifically how it is that legal activists go about utilizing the law in litigation (see, e.g., both Pedriana and Wasby for exceptions).…”