Comparative Legal Mobilization

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This proposed panel probes the roots of legal mobilization and responds to the call for scholarship that demonstrates law’s role in shaping political systems, power structures, and social movements. It advances the study of legal mobilization by bringing together a diverse set of scholars, employing wide-ranging methods and sources of data from multiple regions of the world, including both democratic and authoritarian regimes. The papers suggest that legal consciousness can change dramatically when the stakes are high, spurring the search for legal knowledge, shifting the understanding of the constitution, leading individuals to expand their social networks, and driving legal mobilization. Gallagher’s paper explores the way disappearances of people in Mexico produce rapid and fundamental changes in legal consciousness, legal mobilization, and social networks of those left behind. The paper by Taylor presents the complex relationship between legal mobilization and the invocation of constitutional rights in Colombia. Brinks et al. examine the effect of the 2010 UN declaration of water as a human right on legal mobilization by the most marginalized members of societies asserting claims to water. Finally, the paper by Whiting and Guo asks, under what conditions do citizens in China take legal action when they lose their land? It shares Brinks et al.’s focus on key resources and echoes Gallagher’s theme of high-stakes losses that drive legal mobilization. The panel embraces the conference theme of pluralism in several ways. Bringing together leading senior, mid-career, junior, and Ph.D.-level scholars, this group of men and women present research on cases ranging from Latin America to East Asia. They employ multiple sources and methods, spanning ethnography, cross-national comparison, and large-n survey experiment contextualized by stakeholder interviews in a subset of surveyed communities; methods range from discourse to statistical analysis. Together, the panel offers empirical relevance and methodological diversity to advance theories of legal mobilization.

Sub Unit

• Division 26: Law and Courts

Individual Presentations

• Gaining Voice & Grappling with the Law - Janice Kreinick Gallagher, Rutgers-Newark

• Legal Mobilization and the Embedding of Constitutional Law - Whitney K Taylor, San Francisco State University

• Decentered Construction of Global Rights: Lessons from the Human Right to Water - Daniel M. Brinks, University of Texas at Austin; Bruce M. Wilson, University of Central Florida

• Effect of High vs Low Stakes on Legal Mobilization: A Survey Experiment in China - Susan Whiting, University of Washington; Zhaowen Guo, University of Washington

Chair

• Michael W. McCann University of Washington, Seattle

Discussant

• Lisa Hilbink University of Minnesota, Twin Cities