LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Vol. 16 No. 11 (November 2006) pp.906-910

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, by Michael W. McCann (ed). London, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006. 654pp. Cloth $275.00/£150.00. ISBN: 0754624978.

Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Dudas, Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut. Email: jeffrey.dudas@uconn.edu.

It is appropriate that Michael McCann has compiled a volume on the topic of law and social movements for Ashgate’s INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF ESSAYS IN LAW AND SOCIETY series. No scholar, after all, has done more to integrate relevant public law and social movement literature than has McCann, whose RIGHTS AT WORK (1994) is a systematic dwelling on the myriad ways that social movements may pursue legal mobilization as a resource for change. McCann’s tome has influenced a generation of scholars, such that “law and social movements” is now a recognizable, and respected, specialty within the field. LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ably captures the major contours of this field. But it also does more. Indeed, the themes of LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS radiate in three directions at once: the book reconstructs the intellectual currents that led to RIGHTS AT WORK; it documents some of the most important related scholarship produced over the last decade; and it points the way forward. As such, it is a worthy contribution, both to the study of law and social movements specifically and to the study of law and society generally.

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS contains 22 previously-published essays and an introductory essay penned by McCann that is exclusive to the volume. The previously-published essays first appeared in a range of law reviews, political science and sociology journals, and, most prominently, interdisciplinary law and society journals (including LAW AND SOCIETY REVIEW, LAW AND SOCIAL INQUIRY, and STUDIES IN LAW, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY). This roster of journals accurately conveys how the research on law and social movements has been produced from a variety of different perspectives and from within a myriad of disciplinary sites. So too does the list of contributors to the volume reflect this diversity: it includes essays by prominent political scientists (Gerald Rosenberg, John Brigham, Neal Milner and Jonathon Goldberg-Hiller, Joel Handler, and McCann himself), sociologists (Francesca Polletta, Austin Turk, Paul Burstein, and Steven Barkan), and scholars who are affiliated with law schools (Alan Hunt and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw).

Given this varied nature of scholars and disciplines, McCann’s introductory essay serves an important integrating and unifying purpose. To this end, McCann notes that the most direct engagements of how law-use can simultaneously advance and constrain movement goals are found in the legal-mobilization scholarship (p.xi). This scholarship examines how, in Frances Kahn Zemans’ important early formulation, ordinary people make legal [*907] claims on government to advance their interests; it emphasizes that “what the populace actually receives from government is to a large extent dependent upon their willingness and ability to assert and use the law on their own behalf” (Zemans 1983: 694). Legal-mobilization scholars typically compliment this focus on instrumental effects with an emphasis on the cultural power of law: how legal rules, symbols, and discursive conventions provide to users conceptual resources both for evaluating their own interests and for assessing the legitimacy of the world around them (McCann 1994; Scheingold 2004; Dudas 2005). Both the political and cultural dimensions of legal mobilization thus make legal strategies potentially attractive resources for the pursuit of movement goals.

Accordingly, exploration of the multiple dimensions of legal mobilization, and the potential of social movements to exploit those dimensions, is the overwhelming focus of McCann’s volume. LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS is, for example, divided thematically into 4 parts that approximate the process-based account of legal mobilization that McCann provided in RIGHTS AT WORK – an account that itself traced the political and cultural work done for movement participants by acts of legal mobilization. Thus, 6 essays (grouped by McCann in Part II of the volume and subtitled “Legal Framing and Claiming by Social Movements”) specifically elucidate the cultural aspects of legal mobilization by social movements, while 8 essays (grouped by McCann in Part III and subtitled “Legal Leveraging Power: Contestation, Containment, and Cooptation”) illuminate the more instrumental, political aspects of legal mobilization for those movements. Accordingly, 14 of the 22 essays contained in LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS forward the legal-mobilization approach directly, with McCann’s own 1991 and 1996 essays (contained in Part I – “Analytical Frameworks and Methodological Principles”) providing epistemological and methodological grounding for the studies of legal mobilization that follow. Moreover, the volume’s final section (Part IV – entitled “Law, Change, and Hegemony: Assessing Legal Mobilization Politics”) features prominent essays by Hunt, Crenshaw, and Joel Handler (amongst others) that, like the concluding chapter of RIGHTS AT WORK, assess the degree to which legal strategies might contribute to the emancipatory aims of social movements.

LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS is not, though, simply the story of how RIGHTS AT WORK was born. Instead, McCann moves beyond foundational essays and includes much scholarship that has been published in the years following the publication of RIGHTS AT WORK. 10 of the volume’s 22 essays, for example, were published after 1994. And while many of these essays rely upon the general approach presented in RIGHTS AT WORK, some of them, including especially the essays by Polletta (2000) and Goldberg-Hiller and Milner (2003), break new ground in the study of how social movements dedicated to redistributive aims have employed legal strategies. [*908]

Yet this focus on liberation, which is unyielding, offers a potentially misleading account of the relationship between law and social movements. Indeed, in arguing for a more nuanced vision of why people mobilize law, McCann acknowledges that the vast majority of the legal-mobilization scholarship is pre-occupied with the use of law by social movements that aim to unsettle existing configurations of power. Accordingly, legal-mobilization scholars have, with few exceptions, ignored the ways that social movements committed either to opposing redistributive politics or to reactionary aims have also exploited the cultural and political power of law (but see Herman 1997; Krishnan and den Dulk 2001 [included in LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS]; Goldberg-Hiller 2002; Dudas 2005; Hatcher 2005). McCann is himself sensitive to such an omission, as evidenced by his own recently published research (Haltom and McCann 2004; McCann and Dudas 2006), which focuses explicitly on the role of law in propelling New Right politics in the United States.

McCann argues that this is not the only weakness in the law and social movements canon. He notes that the existing legal-mobilization scholarship is strongly focused on American politics and is, accordingly, insufficiently comparative in nature. While there has been more research in this area in the last decade (some of which is included in LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS; see also Epp 1998 and Moustafa 2007), it remains one of the most obvious sites for future scholarship, both for legal-mobilization scholars and for the study of law and social movements.

Nor, McCann suggests, have most legal-mobilization scholars been sufficiently attentive to the emerging law and society research in the area of legal consciousness (Greenhouse, Yngvesson, and Engel 1994; Ewick and Silbey 1998; Gilliom 2001; Nielsen 2004). This research, which explores how ordinary people experience (or do not experience) law as an operative force in their lives, suggests that the capacity and inclination of people to envision law as an appropriate resource for pursuing their interests varies based upon social location (with race, gender, and class positioning emerging as particularly important factors). It is thus reasonable to suppose that such variation influences the attainment of the sort of specifically legal understanding of one’s situation that scholars frequently cite as a necessary condition for the possibility of legal mobilization by movement activists and participants alike. Systematic integration of such insights with research on law and social movements is, however, in only the nascent stages (see, for example, Lovell 2006).

McCann’s identification of these future directions for research makes LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS an even more useful volume. Indeed, because it excavates the ground on which the law and social movements field was built, provides an overview of recent important scholarship, and makes a series of substantive recommendations for ways that research should proceed, LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS is an important contribution. As such, it is a [*909] welcome addition to the libraries of all scholars who are interested either in law and social movements specifically or in law and society generally.

REFERENCES:

Dudas, Jeffrey R. 2005. “In the Name of Equal Rights: ‘Special’ Rights and the Politics of Resentment in Post-Civil Rights America.” 39 LAW AND SOCIETY REVIEW 723-758.

Epp, Charles R. 1998. THE RIGHTS REVOLUTION: LAWYERS, ACTIVISTS, AND SUPREME COURTS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

Ewick, Patricia and Susan S. Silbey. 1998. THE COMMON PLACE OF LAW: STORIES FROM EVERYDAY LIFE. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

Gilliom, John. 2001. OVERSEERS OF THE POOR: SURVEILLANCE, RESISTANCE, AND THE LIMITS OF PRIVACY. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

Goldberg-Hiller, Jonathan. 2002. THE LIMTIS TO UNION: SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AND THE POLITICS OF CIVIL RIGHTS. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Goldberg-Hiller, Jonathan, and Neal Milner. 2003. “Rights as Excess: Understanding the Politics of Special Rights.” 29 LAW AND SOCIAL INQUIRY 1075-1118.

Greenhouse, Carol J., Barbara Yngvesson, and David M. Engel. 1994. LAW AND COMMUNITY IN THREE AMERICAN TOWNS. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Haltom, William, and Michael W. McCann. 2004. DISTORTING THE LAW: POLITICS, MASS MEDIA, AND THE LITIGATION CRISIS. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

Hatcher, Laura J. 2005. “Economic Libertarians, Property and Institutions: Linking Activism, Ideas, and Identities among Property Rights Advocates.” In Austin Sarat and Stuart A. Scheingold (eds). THE WORLDS CAUSE LAWYERS MAKE: STRUCTURE AND AGENCY IN LEGAL PRACTICE (pp.112-146). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Herman, Didi. 1997. THE ANTI-GAY AGENDA: ORTHODOX VISION AND THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

Krishnan, Jayanth K. and Kevin R. den Dulk 2001. “So Help Me God: A Comparative Study of Religious Interest Group Litigation.” 30 GEORGIA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AND COMPARATIVE LAW 233.

Lovell, George I. 2006. “Justice Excused: The Deployment of Law in Everyday Political Encounters.” 40 LAW AND SOCIETY REVIEW 283-324. [*910]

McCann, Michael W. 1994. RIGHTS AT WORK: PAY EQUITY REFORM AND THE POLITICS OF LEGAL MOBILIZATION. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

McCann, Michael W., and Jeffrey R. Dudas. 2006. “Retrenchment…and Resurgence? Mapping the Changing Context of Movement Lawyering in the United States.” In Austin Sarat and Stuart A. Scheingold (eds). CAUSE LAWYERS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS (pp.37-59). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

Moustafa, Tamir. 2007 (forthcoming). THE STRUGGLE FOR CONSTITUTIONAL POWER: LAW, POLITICS, AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN EGYPT. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Nielsen, Laura Beth. 2004. LICENSE TO HARASS: LAW, HIERARHCY, AND OFFENSIVE PUBLIC SPEECH. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Polletta, Francesca. 2000. “The Structural Context of Novel Rights Claims: Southern Civil Rights Organizing, 1961-1966.” 34 LAW AND SOCIETY REVIEW 367-406.

Scheingold, Stuart A. 2004. THE POLITICS OF RIGHTS: LAWYERS, PUBLIC POLICY, AND POLITICAL CHANGE, 2ND EDITION. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Zemans, Frances Kahn. 1983. “Legal Mobilization: The Neglected Role of the Law in the Political System.” 77 AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW 690-703.

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