Legal Mobilization and the Internationalization of Anticorruption Enforcement

This article contributes a critical study of efforts to internationalize the investigation and prosecution of corruption. The efforts to internationalize anticorruption enforcement are visible, for instance, in calls for an International Anticorruption Court (IACC) or an Anticorruption Protocol to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (APUNCAC). Inspired by a historical sociological perspective, this article investigates mobilizations around these initiatives, how mobilizers frame their engagement, and the ideological context in which they operate. In particular, the article zooms in on elites and how they push for states to internationalize the investigation and prosecution of corruption. This article situates the efforts of these elites in a larger historical context and compares the push to internationalize anticorruption enforcement to earlier legal mobilizations in the field of international criminal justice focused on atrocity crimes.

Claiming Religious Freedom at the European Court of Human Rights: Socio-Legal Field Effects on Legal Mobilization

How do legal strategies at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) vary among activists in highly asymmetrical social positions? Social scientists have demonstrated that legal mobilization raises the pressure on states to provide broader minority accommodation. While this may be true, such outcome-oriented studies overlook the fact that judicial mobilization is itself deeply imbued with inequalities and divergent interests among diverse activists. We lack comparative studies to examine how such differences play out in litigation. Drawing on a qualitative in-depth study among Sikh, Muslim, Catholic, Evangelical, and secular advocacy groups involved in religious freedom disputes at the ECtHR, this article argues that claims making often is a balancing act between legal power relations and extra-legal commitments, which leads to variation in activists’ leverage to challenge legal marginalization. First, hostile legal environments discourage more easily activists with weaker transnational connections who are in vulnerable domestic positions. Second, while the most marginalized readily seek to fit identity narratives into dominant legal frames of religion, more powerful actors can target the core of legal principles and power distribution within the legal field as such. Even when unsuccessful in judicial outcomes, they might affect broader political and legal debates.

The Limits and Power of Law: What the Absence of #MeToo in Taiwan Can Tell Us about Legal Mobilization

The #MeToo movement gained global prominence after Hollywood celebrities came forward with their experiences of sexual violence and encouraged others to do the same. This was by no means the first time a woman had told the world of her experience of sexual violation, but this time, the powerful were paying attention: “Women have been saying these things forever. It is the response to them that has changed” (MacKinnon 2020, 7). High-quality investigative journalists vetted the women's accounts and provided more stories of sexual abuse and predation. Many survivors have since come forward with their own names and their perpetrators’ names, leading some prominent men to be deprived of their fame and positions of power. The #MeToo movement makes two things matter and count: what the victims say and what the perpetrators did. It has raised the perpetrators’ accountability and the victims’ credibility and reversed the scenario of sexual violation: making the perpetrator, not the victim, pay for the sexual harm.

With or Without You: Qing, Li, Fa, and Legal Pluralism in China

The concept of legal pluralism was introduced to China in the mid-1990s to address the conflict between state law and local norms and customs. More than two decades after its introduction, the scope of legal pluralism in China has shifted to the coexistence and interaction between state law and nonstate orders. In this article, I review theoretical discussions and empirical studies on legal pluralism in China. The existing studies on legal pluralism focus mostly on rural villages, which marginalizes the lived experience of urban residents who are also caught in China’s rapid legal transplantation in recent decades. At the same time, law and society scholars who study labor dispute resolution in urban China tend to frame the questions as legal mobilization, rather than legal pluralism. The term qingli 情理[commonsense feelings of justice] is a common theme underlying the scholarship of legal pluralism and legal mobilization in China, and thus it has the potential to bring them together and bridge the findings of the two bodies of scholarship. This article contributes to the literature on Chinese law and society by demonstrating the role that qingli plays in bridging different areas of sociolegal studies.

Rettspolitisk mobilisering og strategisk sakførsel mot isolasjon i norske fengsler

Solitary confinement in prison and police detention has been a widespread criminal policy and human rights problem in the Scandinavian countries for decades. However, in recent years, there has been a significant legal mobilization in Norway whereby lawyers individually and collectively have challenged solitary confinement in the courts. This use of strategic litigation has been directed towards solitary confinement in police custody, remand and during imprisonment. Based on qualitative interviews and documents, we analyze the organizational and legal strategy behind this legal mobilization, along with its effects and preconditions. We find that strategic litigation by lawyers has played an important role in the struggle against solitary confinement in Norway, but that it has benefited from – and played in tandem with – a legal and political opportunity structure consisting of national as well as international actors, processes, and legal frameworks. These findings raise the question of whether lawyers and civil society can contribute in similar ways in the other Scandinavian countries.

Garment Workers

Launched in 1995 with the discovery of more than seventy enslaved Thai workers in a suburban apartment complex surrounded by barbed wire fence, the movement to end garment sweatshops—led by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center—pioneered the integration of strategic litigation and worker organizing to challenge inequality in Los Angeles. The sweatshop regime was built upon a legal foundation of subcontracting, which insulated retailers and manufacturers from the contractors actually producing clothing. At its most ambitious, the campaign sought to make legal responsibility follow economic power, rupturing the fiction that protected retailers and manufacturers from labor abuses such as those uncovered in the Thai worker case. Chapter 2 shows how lawyers built a powerful alliance with labor and grassroots organizers, won important legal victories in court, and achieved passage of a landmark state law creating manufacturer liability for contract labor violations. It then traces the campaign through the fierce battle against retailer Forever 21, which showed the power of industry countermobilization and ultimately marked the end of the litigation campaign. This outcome underscored a central lesson of legal mobilization in the new economy: Individual enforcement and litigation strategies, even when paired with innovative organizing and media campaigns, faced long odds challenging abuse enabled by extensive contracting and—crucially—the threat of global outsourcing. However, in fusing law and organizing, the anti-sweatshop campaign marked a new beginning in the movement against low-wage work—one that would deploy the tools honed in the garment manufacturing context to target Los Angeles’s immobile service industries.