1st Edition

Law and Social Movements

Edited By Michael McCann Copyright 2006

    The work of both socio-legal scholars and specialists working in social movements research continues to contribute to our understanding of how law relates to and informs the politics of social movements. In the 1990s, an important line of new research, most of it initiated by those working in the law and society tradition, began to bridge the gaps between these two areas of scholarship. This work includes new approaches to group ’legal mobilization’ politics; analysis of the judicial impact on social reform struggles; studies of individual legal mobilization in civil disputing and an almost entirely new area of research in ’cause lawyering’. It brings together the best of this research introduced by a detailed essay by the editor.

    Acknowledgements, Series Preface, Introduction, PART I. ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORKS AND METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES, 1. 'Legal Mobilization and Social Reform Movements: Notes on Theory and Its Application', Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, 11, pp.225-54, 2. 'Positivism, Interpretivism, and the Study of Law', Law and Social Inquiry, 21, pp. 435-55, 3. 'Causal Versus Constitutive Explanations (or, On the Difficulty of Being so Positive ... )', Law and Social Inquiry, 21, pp. 457-82, PART II. LEGAL FRAMING AND CLAIMING BY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, 4. 'Right, Rage, and Remedy: Forms of Law in Political Discourse', Studies in American Political Development, 2, pp. 303-16, 5. 'The Structural Context of Novel Rights Claims: Southern Civil Rights Organizing, 1961-1966', Law and Society Review, 34, pp. 367-406, 6. 'Human Rights in Israel/Palestine: The History and Politics of a Movement', Journal of Palestine Studies, 30, pp. 21-38, 7. 'So Help Me God: A Comparative Study of Religious Interest Group Litigation', Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law, 30, pp. 233-75, 8. 'The ADA on the Road: Disability Rights in Germany', Law and Social Inquiry, 27, pp. 723-62, 9. 'Rights as Excess: Understanding the Politics of Special Rights', Law and Social Inquiry, 28, pp. 1075-118, PART III. LEGAL LEVERAGING POWER: CONTESTATION, CONTAINMENT, COOPTATION, 10. 'Law as a Weapon in Social Conflict', Social Problems, 23,pp.276-91, 11. 'Legal Mobilization as a Social Movement Tactic: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity', American Journal of Sociology, 96,pp. 1201-25, 12. 'Comparing Women's Rights Litigation in The Netherlands and the United States', Polity, 28, pp. 189-215, 13. 'Long-Term Strategies in Japanese Environmental Litigation', Law and Social Inquiry, 18, pp. 605-27, 14. 'Fufubessei Movement in Japan: Thinking about Women's Resistance and Subjectivity', Frontiers of Gender Studies, 2, pp. 107-14, 15. 'Law and the Protection of Cultural Communities: The Case of Native American Fishing Rights', Law and Policy, 9, pp. 125-42, 16. 'Legal Control of the Southern Civil Rights Movement', American Sociological Review, 49, pp. 552-65, 17. 'Social Movements, Law, and Society: The Institutionalization of the Environmental Movement', University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 150, pp. 85-118, PART IV. LAW, CHANGE AND HEGEMONY: ASSESSING LEGAL MOBILIZATION POLITICS, 18. 'Rights and Social Movements: Counter-Hegemonic Strategies', Journal of Law and Society, 17, pp. 309-28, 19. 'Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law', Harvard Law Review, 101, pp. 1331-87, 20. 'Family, Law and Sexuality: Feminist Engagements', Social and Legal Studies, 8, pp. 369-90, 21. 'Postmodernism, Protest, and the New Social Movements', Law and Society Review, 26, pp. 697-731, 22. 'International Law and Social Movements: Challenges of Theorizing Resistance', Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 41,pp.397-433, Name Index

    Biography

    Michael McCann is Gordon Hirabayashi Professor for the Advancement of Citizenship at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. A former chair of the Political Science Department, he is the Founding Director of the Comparative Law and Society Studies (CLASS) Center as well as Director of the recently reconstructed undergraduate Law, Societies, and Justice program. McCann has written several books, and is presently working on several new projects that analyze how the saturation of mass culture with particular narratives about law undercuts the progressive, democratic possibilities of rights-based legal mobilization politics.

    '...a worthy contribution, both to the study of law and social movements specifically and to the study of law and society generally.' The Law and Politics Book Review 'The real value of this collection lies in bringing diverse sources together in a single convenient volume and thus allowing the debate over the nature and effectiveness of "legal mobilization" to flourish.' British Journal of Criminology