Resistance & Mobilization in Constitutional Development: Potentials & Pitfalls

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Social groups and movements repeatedly seek to challenge or entrench privilege and enforceable rights in constitutional regimes and frameworks. How have such popular forces shaped the course of US constitutional development and the fates of these groups? Debtors, sailors, African Americans, immigrants, and women, as well as white men, are among the many groups that have claimed legal status, rights, and remedies under the US Constitution and have sought to exercise and protect these claims. This panel identifies the role of some of their potent instances of popular engagement and activism -- claim-making, resistance, avoidance or circumvention, co-optation of civil institutions, militancy -- for shaping these group’s rights and statuses and for influencing constitutional development. The papers offer a range of perspectives on the ways that federal authority and dominant legal frameworks can be thwarted, redirected or re-envisioned, or aided and amplified by popular legal mobilization or resistance at local or state levels, and how such forces can reveal the dark side as well as the radical creative resources of popular activism for rights, status, and inclusion.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 27: Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence

Individual Presentations

• The Dark Side of Law & Social Movements: The KKK & American Citizenship - Elizabeth Beaumont, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Militant Suffragists and Constitutional Transformation - Lynda G. Dodd, Princeton University

• Dignity and America’s Multiple Constitutional Traditions - Connor Ewing, University of Toronto

Chair

• Emily Zackin Johns Hopkins University

Discussant

• Anna O. Law CUNY Brooklyn College