Civil Disobedience, Sabotage, and Violence in US Environmental Activism

This chapter explores the logic of illegal or “radical” tactics in the United States environmentalist movement, generating broader theoretical insights to guide research in other national settings. Two theoretical concepts help to explain environmentalists’ escalation from legal activism (lobbying, litigation, marches, etc.) to more confrontational tactics such as civil disobedience, sabotage, and violence. The first concept is the stepwise escalation of intensity: from legal activism to civil disobedience, to sabotage, to interpersonal violence. Activists escalate from one level of tactical intensity to the next when government and business interests prove unresponsive to activism at the lower level. The degree of escalation is proportional to the degree of government and business resistance. The second concept is the diversity of tactics. Even in highly contested campaigns, only a minority of activists escalates to illegal tactics, while the majority continues to employ legal means of struggle. Tactical diversity is a source of strength: civil disobedience and sabotage may temporarily block environmentally destructive projects until legal challenges and legislative rule changes end them for good. Tactical diversity also creates opportunities for solidarity, with different organizations contributing to the same campaign according to their tactical comparative advantages. The chapter lays out directions for further research and speculates about the future—whether the worsening climate crisis portends an increase in the most radical tactics, sabotage and violence.

Closing Open Government: Grassroots Policy Conversion of China’s Open Government Information Regulation and Its Aftermath

How and when do opportunities for political participation through courts change under authoritarianism? Although China is better known for tight political control than for political expression, the 2008 Open Government Information (OGI) regulation ushered in a surge of political-legal activism. We draw on an original dataset of 57,095 OGI lawsuits, supplemented by interview data and government documents, to show how a feedback loop between judges and court users shaped possibilities for political activism and complaint between 2008 and 2019. Existing work suggests that authoritarian leaders crack down on legal action when they feel politically threatened. In contrast, we find that courts minted, defined, and popularized new legal labels to cut off access to justice for the super-active litigants whose lawsuits had come to dominate the OGI docket. This study underscores the power of procedural rules and frontline judges in shaping possibilities for political participation under authoritarianism.

TOOL OR LENS? WORLDVIEW THEORY AND CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVE LEGAL ACTIVISM

This article combines historical and philosophical analysis to examine and critique the ideas motivating Christian conservative legal activism. Such activists routinely claim to be motivated by a Christian worldview, which they define as a comprehensive explanation of reality that determines all their thinking and action, including their legal activism and argumentation. Examination of the historical and philosophical roots of the concept of worldview identified by Christian thinkers reveals two understandings of the concept: an analytic tool for rationally comparing the evidence for different social philosophies, and a pre-theoretical lens that determines what counts as evidence in the first place. Christian conservatives have largely favored the first sense of worldview as a tool to understand issues like sexuality and gender identity in an essentialist way and to demonstrate with foundationalist logic the rational superiority of their legal conclusions about these issues. However, a comparison of the Christian conservative worldview and the queer theory worldview illustrates how this understanding of worldview as a tool fails because there is no neutral perspective outside of any worldview, from which one could examine and compare one to another. The idea of worldview as a pre-theoretical, historically, and socially contingent lens can be more productive. Embracing this notion of worldview in a personalist way is necessary to build a culture of dialogue that uses narrative to pursue the truth while also respecting and honoring the different perspectives from which these narratives are told.

Purely Consequentialist Legal Activism in the Brazilian Criminal Constitutional Jurisdiction based on Case Studies in the Jurisprudence of the Supreme Federal Court

The present study intended, based on the use of the methodology related to legal consequentialism, the field of consequentialist argumentation and possible risks of its use by judges, in particular, those who perform constitutional jurisdiction and efficient speeches and the concept of purely consequentialist activism, assess whether, and to what extent, it would be possible to divide the concept of purely consequentialist activism into degrees according to the legal nature of the decision handed down within the scope of the Supreme Federal Court, more specifically, with regard to the (non) provisionality of the decision. Throughout the work it was possible to divide purely consequentialist activism into two species. The first of these, called first degree consequentialist activism, characterized by monocratic decisions or judgments that respect the limits of merit and, consequently, the principle of collegiality, and; second-degree consequentialist activism, characterized by monocratic decisions that, not meeting the limits of precautionary decisions, end up disrespecting the principle of collegiality

Paradoxes of Strategic Labour Rights Litigation: Insights from the Baldia Factory Fire Litigation

This chapter focuses on the legal activism that followed the Ali Enterprises factory fire and its aftermath in Pakistan. This chapter has two purposes: firstly, it documents the legal proceedings that were initiated and pursued in the courts of Pakistan as well as its interconnected developments. Secondly, I aim to use this engagement with the legal proceedings of the Baldia factory fire aftermath as an opportunity for an in-depth reflection on the capacity and, finally, suitability of the judicial process to bring about justice in struggles over human and labour rights. Providing a rare and insider account of the legal proceedings in the Pakistani courts and its interconnected developments, I hope to lay the empirical foundation for the theoretical and strategic claims of this study. It is against the background and based on the experience with the litigation and legal advocacy following the Baldia fire that I examine the two what I perceive as “paradoxes” at the heart of the litigation. The first is the inseparability of the “limited justice” that may result from such litigation on one hand, and the “structural injustice” that informs and determines the conditions the litigation seeks to address—and transform—on the other hand. The second paradox concerns the inseparability of both law and lawlessness as regards the legal context of the litigation, advocacy and policy proposal elements that are here in play.My argument is that these apparently contradictory phenomena not only coexist alongside one another but that they guarantee each other’s existence. This analysis leads me to the conclusion that in order to understand and improve such forms of strategic litigation, it is necessary to measure its success and failure in terms of three distinct but interconnected criteria. These are the tactical, strategic and structural impacts of the litigation. Ultimately, I will argue for rejecting what is often perceived by involved stakeholders to be an unavoidable choice between nihilism, euphoria or incremental reform in this context. But, to the contrary, I will argue for a conception of legal struggles as a means of building sustainable and fruitful forms of resistance and of change based on the recognition and exploitation of these irreconcilable paradoxes rather than fruitless attempts to ignore or transcend these irreconcilable contradictions.

Femicidio and Feminicidio Laws in Latin America

Femicidio refers to the murder of a woman because of her gender. Feminicidio emphasizes the role of the state in enabling these crimes and the impunity with which they are treated. Feminist legal activism and the development of supranational and regional human rights instruments throughout the 1990s and 2000s were essential to the development of femicidio/feminicidio laws across Latin America. As of 2018, such laws were in effect in 18 countries across the region. However, the precise content and scope of laws criminalizing femicidio/feminicidio vary. For example, in the case of Mexico, transnational feminist legal activism, including a case brought before the Inter-American Human Rights Court, was essential to shaming the Mexican state into codifying feminicidio. This process was facilitated by the presence of feminist legislators within the Mexican legislature, who advocated for such legislation. In the case of Nicaragua and Peru, local feminist advocacy and copious documentation of the scope of the problem of femicidio/feminicidio proved more significant in the ultimate codification of femicidio/feminicidio. However, the legal advances against gender violence achieved in Nicaragua in 2012 were subsequently undone due to pressure from men’s rights and religious conservatives, leading to the weak implementation of the law criminalizing femicidio.