The Social Movement Turn in Law

Abstract

The rise of social movements in US legal scholarship is a current response to an age‐old problem in progressive legal thought: harnessing law for social change while maintaining a distinction between law and politics. This problem erupted in controversy around the civil rights–era concept of legal liberalism defined by activist courts and lawyers pursuing political reform through law. Contemporary legal scholars have responded by building on social science to develop a new concept—movement liberalism—that assigns leadership of transformative change to social movements to preserve conventional roles for courts and lawyers. Movement liberalism aims to achieve the lost promise of progressive reform, while avoiding critiques of legal activism that have divided scholars for a half‐century. Yet rather than resolving the law‐politics problem, movement liberalism reproduces long‐standing debates, carrying forward critical visions of law that it seeks to transcend.

Turning on the lights? Publicity and defensive legal mobilization in protest-related trials in Russia

“…On the other hand, there is an ongoing tension between “the need of the criminal defendant for a fair trial and the tendency towards distortion and overexposure of an event inherent in extensive media coverage” (Wexler, 1995). This brings to the table classic debates about different ideals of legal professionalism—“client‐centered lawyering” versus “movement lawyering” (Cummings, 2018), debates no less vivid in repressive settings. From the case study of lawyers publicizing the case or avoiding the buzz, we once again come to debating the ongoing tension around an “age‐old problem: making law advance progressive politics, while simultaneously keeping politics out of law” (Cummings, 2018, p. 404).…”

Art, not a science: How legal impact organizations identify community need

“…In doing so, cause lawyers and legal organizations may be unintentionally supplanting movement goals, shifting ownership of grievances from the grassroots to elite professionals (Bell Jr., 1976; Menkel‐Meadow, 1998; Tushnet, 2005). Some frame this phenomenon as an accountability problem (Bell Jr., 1976; Cummings, 2017), arguing that cause lawyers are pulled between the competing interests of the client and the cause. Ultimately, some cause lawyers are observed to be “only weakly responsive to—and sometimes even in conflict with—the interests” of their clients because they choose a political agenda, or their perception of the cause, over client/constituency priorities (Cummings, 2018, p. 368).…”

Kangaroo Court: The Black Power Movement and the Courtroom as a Space of Resistance

“…For example, emerging from this turn is the idea that social movements make law themselves. In other words, social movements affect the law by swaying public opinion, transforming culture, creating new majorities, and developing a new consensus, which the courts then simply validate (Cummings, 2018). Implicit in this model is the idea that in order to be successful in creating social change, social movements must frame their goals in ways that draw mass and elite support and avoid conservative backlash (Cummings, 2018).…”