4271 - Legal Resistance

Session Submission Type: Paper Session 100min

Description

The image of lawyers with laptops sitting in airports around the country as they struggled to assist immigrants stranded by President Trump’s immigration ban has become an indelible symbol of this country’s most recent wave of legal resistance. Lawyers have been called to act to defend environmental regulations, the rights of religious minorities, members of the LGBT community, voting rights, freedom of the press, and aspects of our most taken-for-granted democratic institutions. What can be learned about the role of legal institutions and actors in defending against attacks on both longstanding rights and recently won legal victories, in the context of a rapidly changing political environment?

Sub Unit

• Section on Sociology of Law / Legal Resistance

Session Organizer

• Steven A. Boutcher, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Presider

• Mary Nell Trautner, State University of New York-Buffalo

Individual Presentations

• Expert Interventions: Attorneys’ Influence on the Implementation of School Discipline Reform - Meg Caven, Brown University

• Gender Neutrality in the Courts - Abigail C. Saguy, University of California-Los Angeles; Juliet Williams, University of California-Los Angeles

• The Institutional Activation of Popular Consultations in Latin America: Environmental Protection through Political Participation - Diana Rodriguez-Franco, University of Los Andes

• The Making and Unmaking of Femicidio/Feminicidio Laws in Mexico and Nicaragua - Paulina Garcia del Moral, University of Guelph; Pamela Jane Neumann, Bucknell University

Discussant

• Ashley T. Rubin, University of Toronto