Lehoucq & Taylor - 2019 - Conceptualizing Legal Mobilization PDF

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Law & Social Inquiry Social

Volume 00, Issue 00, 1–28, 2019 Inquiry
Conceptualizing Legal Mobilization: How
Should We Understand the Deployment
of Legal Strategies?
Emilio Lehoucq and Whitney K. Taylor
Social movements have increasingly incorporated legal strategies into their repertoires
of contention. Yet, both sociolegal and social movement scholarship lack a systematic and
theoretically coherent way to conceptualize legal mobilization. In fact, scholars disagree
(sometimes in fundamental ways) about what constitutes legal mobilization, which has
resulted in conceptual slippage around how the term is used. This article proposes a more
self-conscious approach that will facilitate the aggregation of findings across studies. To do
so, it sets forth a systematic conceptualization of legal mobilization and situates it within a
typology of uses of the law. It also contextualizes the typology with respect to emerging
literatures within social movement and sociolegal scholarship and proposes areas for further
research that would benefit from a more rigorous conceptualization of legal mobilization.
INTRODUCTION
Social movements have increasingly incorporated legal strategies into their reper-
toires of contention. The classic example is the NAACP’s strategic litigation that lead
to the seminal case of Brown v. Board of Education within the broader civil rights move-
ment (McAdam 1982). In the United States, the perceived success of the campaign led
to a diffusion of legal strategies within social movements. As David Meyer and Steven
Boutcher (2007, 88) argue,
the visible extent of organizational and strategic emulation is striking. The

language of rights and the strategy of litigation extend well beyond the
concerns of ethnic minorities, much less African Americans, to include
women, disabled people, the environment, gays and lesbians, student journal-
ists, and animals – in laboratories, farms, and the wild. . . . Opponents of the
social movements of the 1960s have also organized litigation-oriented social
movement groups to advance their political concerns.
Emilio Lehoucq ([email protected]) is a PhD Student at Northwestern University. He has

conducted research on social movements and legal mobilization and religion and politics. His current
research focuses on the emergence and diffusion of machine learning in the United States.
Whitney K. Taylor ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor of Political Science at San Francisco
State University. Her research focuses on the intersection of rights, law, and contentious politics, particu-
larly in the contexts of Colombia and South Africa.
We are very thankful to Sidney Tarrow, Robert Nelson, Joshua Basseches, Erin M. Adam, Lisa Hilbink,
Lynette Chua, Michael McCann, and four anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on previous
drafts of this article. This article did not receive any funding.
© 2019 American Bar Foundation. 1

2 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY
If anything, Meyer and Boutcher’s list underrepresents the range of social movements
that have come to use legal strategies. A contemporary example is the transnational
movement to protect privacy following increasing policy attacks and surveillance,
which has also relied on legal mobilization among other, more theatrical strategies such
as hacking Web pages (Lehoucq and Tarrow forthcoming). Legal strategies have not
been limited to social movements operating in the United States, or even to those
in democratic contexts. Movements comprising groups as diverse as people displaced
by civil conflict in Colombia (Rodríguez-Garavito and Rodríguez-Franco 2015) and
movements in contexts that we would expect to be unreceptive, such as postcolonial
Hong Kong (Tam 2012), have also incorporated legal strategies within their repertoires
of contention. The use of legal strategies by social movements is quite widespread.
Although the empirical importance of social movements using legal strategies is
clear, scholars lack a systematic and theoretically coherent way to conceptualize legal
mobilization. As Sidney Tarrow (2012, 22) recently noted:
We know well that movements often use legal strategies, as the civil rights
movement did in the United States even before the 1950s; and we know that
legal frameworks affect movement strategies and outcomes . . . But these are
empirical observations: we have no general theory that accounts for the
relations between social movements, the courts, and legal systems, although
work on “legal mobilization” has provided a start in this direction.
Tarrow’s call for a general theory is as desirable as it is ambitious. Systematic theory

building is necessary for knowledge about legal mobilization to cumulate over time
and will help scholars reach more valid conclusions. This is important for the social
scientific enterprise (Gerring 2011), and also for practice-oriented researchers who need
the best possible knowledge to decide appropriate interventions in the social world;
better theories allow for better problem solving (Prasad 2018). We argue that a more
systematic conceptualization of legal mobilization will go a long way toward
providing the foundation integral to the development of systematic theory building.
Conceptualization is crucial for social science research within both interpretive and
positivist paradigms (Goertz and Mahoney 2012; Schaffer 2015). Interpretive scholars
have proposed the development of “portable insights” (Simmons and Smith 2017),
which requires conceptual clarity even if the goal is not causal inference. For positivist
scholars, well-defined concepts that zero in on the attributes of phenomena that make
them relevant for hypotheses, explanations, and causal mechanisms are the necessary
building blocks of theories (Goertz 2006). This is why in other subfields of political
sociology and comparative politics there has been so much attention placed on the
definition of concepts, including political opportunities (Meyer and Minkoff 2004),
democratization (Collier and Levitsky 1997), state capacity (Giraudy 2012), path
dependence (Mahoney 2000; Rixen and Viola 2015), and gradual institutional change
(Streeck and Thelen 2005).
However, this is not yet true for legal mobilization, the concept provided by sociolegal
scholars to theorize the use of legal strategies by social movements, as well as other types of
individual and collective actors. Existing reviews of the field focus on the relationship
between law and power and the degree to which law can be mobilized to challenge the
Conceptualizing Legal Mobilization 3
status quo (McCann 2006), on different strands and theories within the field (Vanhala
2011), on how studies of legal mobilization might fit within social movement scholarship
(Boutcher and Stobaugh 2013), and, more generally, on providing overviews of the field, its
evolution, and directions for future research (Levitsky 2015). These are all of course impor-
tant questions, but they assume relative agreement on the phenomena under study, which is
required to have meaningful discussions about its causes and consequences. Yet, existing
reviews have not paid sufficient attention to definitional debates that might challenge that
assumption. Scholars using the concept of legal mobilization have often not been self-
conscious about their conceptual choices, an important oversight that we seek to remedy.
Indeed, scholars working in the sociolegal tradition disagree (sometimes in funda-
mental ways) about what constitutes legal mobilization, which has prompted concep-
tual slippage in how the term is used in contemporary scholarship. This poses barriers to
the aggregation of insights across studies. This article contributes to sociolegal scholar-
ship and social movement scholarship by conceptualizing legal mobilization within a
typology of different uses of the law. It also situates the typology with respect to emerg-
ing literatures within social movement and sociolegal scholarship and proposes areas for
further research that would benefit from a more rigorous conceptualization of legal
mobilization. This is an important endeavor given the larger theoretical questions that
are involved in the study of legal mobilization and its relation with legal framing and
legal consciousness. Questions about the relationship between legal mobilization and
social change have marked the field since the early classics. More specific questions, such
as the conditions under which social actors engage in legal mobilization, the types of legal
consciousness that lead to legal mobilization, and the kinds of legal frames that are most
effective at challenging powerful elites, all point to the role of law in reproducing the
status quo as well as establishing the conditions for resistance. These questions about
hegemony, resistance, and the law have been central to social theory (Bourdieu 1986;
Poulantzas 2000; Thompson 2016). Furthermore, as legal mobilization connects with
studies on social movements and contentious politics, an overarching theoretical concern
is about reproduction and change in social fields (Fligstein and McAdam 2015).
We define legal mobilization as the use of law in an explicit, self-conscious way
through the invocation of a formal institutional mechanism. This allows us to distin-
guish it from—while also placing it in relation to—legal consciousness and legal fram-
ing. Importantly, this definition of legal mobilization is not limited to the use of legal
strategies by social movements. Although sociolegal scholars have been particularly
interested in social movements, individual and other collective actors besides social
movements also engage in legal mobilization. As we show in more detail below, by
engaging this conceptualization of legal mobilization, we are better positioned to address
new questions raised by the emerging literatures on legal opportunity structures
(e.g., Hilson 2002; B. M. Wilson & Rodríguez Cordero 2006; Andersen 2009;
B. M. Wilson 2009; Evans Case and Givens 2010; De Fazio 2012; Vanhala 2012,
2017), legal framing (e.g., McCammon, Muse, Newman, and Terrell 2007;
Leachman 2013; Vanhala 2017), and legal consciousness (M. E. Gallagher 2006;
J. C. Wilson 2011; W. K. Taylor 2018).
In what follows, we offer a systematic, self-conscious review of the myriad ways in
which different scholars have employed the concept of legal mobilization, highlighting
the key definitional disagreements that have inhibited the development of a
theoretically coherent way to conceptualize legal mobilization within the fields of

sociolegal studies and social movement studies (Section 2). We then discuss the
methodological literature on concept formation as it relates to the concept of legal
mobilization and develop our typology (Section 3). We further show how our concep-
tualization of legal mobilization and related concepts opens up new avenues to explore
interesting theoretical questions suggested by recent trends in the literature (Section 4).
Conclusions follow (Section 5).
DISAGREEMENTS ABOUT HOW TO CONCEPTUALIZE LEGAL

MOBILIZATION
Developing from studies of disputes (Aubert 1963; Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat 1980;
Kidder 1980; Lempert 1980; Mather and Yngvesson 1980; Miller and Sarat 1980; Cain
and Kulcsar 1981), scholarship on legal mobilization has done much to demonstrate the
fraught and contingent but potentially transformative effects of leveraging the law in
social struggles. Importantly, the early literature on legal mobilization (Scheingold
1974; Rosenberg 1991; M. W. McCann 1994) emerged while dominant theorizations
of social movements and contentious politics tended not to explicitly take into account
the role of law within mobilization (e.g., Tarrow 1998). These works provided a neces-
sary corrective, and, in the process, they spurred a series of research agendas on the
relationships between law and social change and between law, power, and hegemony,
encouraging scholars to take seriously everyday encounters with legal discourses, actors,
and institutions in addition to high-profile legal cases.
Often, subsequent studies have focused on the use of legal strategies by social
movements. However, the literature on legal mobilization cannot be reduced to con-
sider exclusively social movements, which is also true of scholarship on contentious
politics. Scholars have demonstrated the utility of examining social movements and
other forms of contention together, under the concept “contentious politics”
(McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, 5). Because these different forms of political
struggle involve the same types of mechanisms, such a distinction hides theoretically
productive comparisons (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2003, 2008; Tarrow 2013).
This implies that collective actors that would not properly be categorized as social
movements—in other words, “sequences of contentious politics based on underlying
social networks, on resonant collective action frames, and on the capacity to sustain
challenges against powerful opponents” (Tarrow 2011, 7)—can also engage in legal
mobilization, just as they participate in other kinds of collective political struggle.
This is the case, for example, for different kinds of networked actors who have turned
to legal mobilization under authoritarian regimes (Moustafa 2003; Diamant, Lubman,
and O’Brien 2005; Ginsburg and Moustafa 2008; Stern 2013; Fu 2017).
Still other times, scholars working on legal mobilization have been interested in
individuals’ everyday encounters with the law (Zemans 1983; Merry 1990; Blackstone,
Uggen, and McLaughlin 2009; Gleeson 2010; M. Gallagher and Yang 2017; W. K.
Taylor 2018). The turn to law may be made more or less difficult by various features
of the actor that seeks to mobilize the law, but the mechanisms of legal mobilization
remain the same whether the actor is a social movement, another kind of collective
actor, or an individual. And importantly, both noncoordinated and coordinated indi-

vidual actions can prompt systemic legal changes, as the work on justice and availability
cascades shows (Kuran and Sunstein 1998; Sikkink 2011).
As Tarrow (2012, 22) suggests, sociolegal scholarship on legal mobilization
provides a useful starting point to theorize the relations between mobilization, the
courts, and legal systems. However, even a cursory review of the classic works shows
the diverse and sometimes contradictory ways in which scholars have used the term
“legal mobilization.” In an oft-quoted definition, Frances Zemans (1983, 700) holds that
“[l]aw is mobilized when a desire or want is translated into a demand as an assertion of
rights.” Richard Lempert (1976, 173) offers an alternative definition, referring to legal
mobilization as “the process by which legal norms are invoked to regulate behavior.”
Other early scholars using the term legal mobilization tended to focus on litigation
tactics without formally defining legal mobilization as synonymous with litigation
(e.g., Black 1973; Mayhew 1975; Milner 1987). Reviews of the literature on legal mobi-
lization generally have not paid explicit attention to issues conceptualization besides
stating a quick definition, often the one provided by Zemans (e.g., McCann 2006,
2008; Vanhala 2011; Boutcher and Stobaugh 2013; Levitsky 2015).
We aim to provide a systematic, self-conscious review of the current state of the
literature on legal mobilization. Existing reviews of the literature provide excellent lin-
eages of the concept of legal mobilization (McCann 2006, 2008; Vanhala 2011;
Boutcher and Stobaugh 2013; Levitsky 2015). Our review allows for a grounded assess-
ment of the ways in which scholars conceptualize legal mobilization, and it also allows
for the identification of key debates in the field. In an effort to investigate the core
debates related to legal mobilization as they play out in practice, we decided to examine
articles in the two leading journals in the field of law and society, Law & Society Review
and Law & Social Inquiry. Law & Social Inquiry is published on behalf of the American
Bar Foundation, and Law & Society Review is the flagship publication of the Law and
Society Association, both influential organizations in the domain of sociolegal studies.
While authors of articles on legal mobilization might seek to publish outside of law and
society journals some of the time, these two journals serve as focal points for scholars
working at the intersection of law and social movements or mobilization. The articles
we review are meant to capture what the field of law and society considers the best work
published in academic journals; however, it is worth keeping in mind our review does
not include books or edited volumes. Importantly, while many early scholars of law and
social change developed conceptualizations of legal mobilization in books rather than
journal articles, the legacies of these conceptual choices (i.e., their impact on the state
of the field today) show up most clearly in articles that seek to apply these existing
theories in new empirical contexts. While our sample is not representative, it is more
comprehensive than existing reviews of the literature on legal mobilization, which tend
to center solely on classic scholars.
Because our focus is on how the concept of legal mobilization has been defined in
pieces of academic research, we limit our attention to the choices that scholars have
made in the context of research publications. A scholar may in everyday usage consider
legal mobilization differently than he or she chooses to do in a given publication. There
may be any number of reasons for a scholar to do this, the most obvious of which is that
everyday conversations do not demand the rigor of a written publication. Yet, scholars
who would seek to publish work on legal mobilization must make choices about how to
define and delimit the concept. Our goal is to promote greater transparency about those
choices and to urge scholars to think carefully about the implications of their choices for
both their own research and for research agendas that transcend the interests of any one
scholar.
We conducted a search for the term legal mobilization in Fall 2017 in the online
archives of both Law & Society Review and Law & Social Inquiry, which yielded 406
articles in total. We reviewed each article to determine the type of article, and we
excluded symposium introductions, review articles, and indices so that our analysis
would refer only to the concept of legal mobilization as authors in pieces of original
research define it. This left us with 152 articles. We further checked to see whether
or not the phrase “legal mobilization” actually appeared in the article (at times, the word
“legal” and the word “mobilization” appearing separately on the same page triggered
inclusion in the search). We removed fifteen articles from our sample for this reason.
We report descriptive statistics of what we found to provide an overall picture of the
variation in how scholars use the term legal mobilization and, when engaging substan-
tively with it, how they conceptualize it. For a scholarly endeavor aimed at accumulat-
ing knowledge about legal mobilization across studies over time, taking stock of the
literature in this way is a first step. The phrase “legal mobilization” exclusively appears
in the works cited of almost 40 percent of the rest of the articles. A further 30 percent
mention the phrase in passing without engaging with it. This leaves forty-one articles
that substantively engage with the concept of legal mobilization.1 Within these forty-
one articles, fifteen treat legal mobilization as an approach, referring to “legal mobiliza-
tion studies” or “legal mobilization theory,” and twenty-one take legal mobilization as
an outcome to be examined, while the five remaining articles explicitly consider legal
mobilization as both as outcome and an approach.
The definitions offered by these articles are as varied as classical definitions of the
concept, and the differences among them reveal deep conceptual and methodological
disagreements between scholars studying the use of law by societal actors. For example,
while Julieta Lemaitre and Kristin Sandvik (2015, 8) refer to “a means of seeking social
change through legal norms, discourse, or symbols,” Lisa Vanhala (2012, 524), calling
on Charles Epp (1998, 18), suggests that legal mobilization should be operationalized as
“the process by which individuals make claims about their legal rights and pursue law-
suits to defend or develop those rights.” Providing yet another definition, Erin Adam
and Betsy Cooper (2017, 837) consider legal mobilization as an approach rather than a
variable and note that legal mobilization studies “analyze the constitutive role of legal
rights by adopting an inclusive definition of the law that emphasizes the effects and
development of legal norms, legal symbols, and legal rights discourses across and
through movements and counter-movements.” Even just among these three examples
we see clear differences in how authors understand the connection between legal mobi-
lization and the formal legal sphere as well as the connection between legal mobilization
and social change, among other differences. The authors then go on to operationalize
legal mobilization in contrasting ways, reflecting the underlying conceptual choices
1. A full list of the forty-one articles we reviewed appears in Appendix A (online). Appendix B
(online) includes an example of the coding procedure that we used.
implied by these definitions. Nearly every article that identifies legal mobilization as
an approach cites Michael McCann’s Rights at Work (McCann 1994), sometimes in
addition to other works. Overall, authors referred to McCann twenty-three times, while
Stuart Scheingold (1974) and Frances Zemans (1983) were cited five and six times,
respectively, in this capacity.
Through an inductive analysis of the articles on our sample, we determined three
major points of discord in contemporary scholarship on legal mobilization. We use the
word “discord” intentionally. These are not necessarily points that are the subject of
overt debate within the literature, not because they do not signal substantial differences
between scholarly approaches, but because scholars using the term legal mobilization
have often paid relatively little attention—with just a sentence here or a citation
there—to alternative approaches. Thus, points of disagreement are apparent but not
fully interrogated in much of the scholarship on legal mobilization. Here it is important
to note that in this section we are describing contemporary usage of the term legal
mobilization. If an author claims to be studying legal mobilization, we take that claim
seriously, even if other scholars might categorize the object of study differently than the
author does.
The first point of discord comes with the question of which activities constitute
legal mobilization. Should the term be used to simply to refer to litigation or should it
also encompass a broader set of claims-making processes? Second, scholars disagree
about the extent to which the target of the claim in question matters for whether
or not an action ought to be considered legal mobilization. Must legal mobilization
be directed at the state, or should the use of legal mechanisms, institutions, and
concepts to compel private actors to change their behavior also be considered legal
mobilization? Third, scholars disagree about the types of claims that count as legal
mobilization. Must actors make claims beyond their own immediate self-interest for
those actions to be considered legal mobilization? How conscious must actors be of
the political nature of their actions? Does legal mobilization necessarily imply conscious
contention, that is, must claimants make an overly political claim or is it sufficient that
the claim made would have political consequences? We address each of these tensions
in turn.
Which Activities Constitute Legal Mobilization?
Historically, there have been two dominant approaches to delimiting the activities
that constitute legal mobilization. One approach focuses on “legal subjects, especially
nonofficial legal actors,” rather than simply on cases, and contends that these legal sub-
jects have complex reasons for engaging the law and nuanced expectations about its use
(McCann 2008, 523–25). Legal subjects operate within a social context comprising in
part official legal institutions and legal norms (McCann 1996). Scholars working in this
tradition contextualize litigation within a broader set of dispute and claims-making
practices. They also recognize that not all citizens have equal capabilities or capacities
to draw on the law. Another set of scholarship has employed the term legal mobilization
when referring to use of litigation by social actors, in what might be called a court-centric
approach. While those who take the broader approach might raise serious questions as to
whether or not legal mobilization should be treated as synonymous with litigation, our
analysis of existing literature demonstrates that this is common. The seminal work in this
approach is The Hollow Hope (Rosenberg 1991), which focused on specific instances of
strategic litigation undertaken in the United States. Subsequent scholars working in this
tradition have—while continuing to focus exclusively on litigation—examined the use of
litigation to advance social movement goals outside of the US context (e.g., Epp 1998;
Tam 2012). These approaches reflect not only differences in what is being studied but also
more fundamental debates about the nature of law and its relationship to power.2
Of the articles reviewed, ten constrained the definition of legal mobilization to be
synonymous with litigation, while twenty-six offered broader understandings of the
term, considering legal norms, narratives, and education within the concept of legal
mobilization, and five articles did not clarify either way. Importantly, in some cases
authors who indicated a broader understanding of the activities that constitute legal
mobilization focused largely on litigation in their empirical sections (which reflects a
decoupling of conceptualization and operationalization). Although the question of
what activities count as legal mobilization appears relatively straightforward in the legal
mobilization-as-litigation framework, sticky definitional questions remain. The category
of “litigation” is actually quite broad, especially in comparative perspective. On the one
hand, the category encompasses strategic litigation, which has often been the focus of
work on questions related to law and social change. On the other hand, litigation in
practice also includes one-off attempts by individuals to resolve disputes. Strategic liti-
gation drawing on substantial support structures (Epp 1998; Teles 2008; Vanhala 2012;
M. Gallagher and Yang 2017) would appear to differ in kind from pro se litigation where
individuals are able to approach the courts themselves to make rights claims, as is the
case in Colombia with the tutela procedure (W. K. Taylor 2018), and both of those
types of litigation differ from litigation undertaken to resolve factual disputes.
Further, the filing of amicus briefs, while not strictly speaking litigation, falls within
a court-centered understanding of legal mobilization (Cichowski 2016).
In the broader conception of legal mobilization, scholars vary as to which activities
beyond litigation they consider. For example, Jeb Barnes and Thomas Burke (2012)
create a “legal mobilization index,” in which they code the experience of various organ-
izations with mobilization related to the Americans with Disabilities Act. The index
allows Barnes and Burke to note whether no action was taken against an organization,
whether an action short of a legal claim was pursued, or whether a formal complaint or
lawsuit was filed. Paul Nolette (2015) considers changes in organizational practices
and legal norms that can be traced back to litigation efforts related to state regulation
of the pharmaceutical industry. One example of the impact of litigation on legal norms
is how working understandings of what constitutes fraud have changed over time.
Christopher Coleman, Laurence Nee, and Leonard Rubinowitz (2005) take two mobi-
lization strategies—litigation and boycotts—and consider them together, as comple-
mentary parts of the civil rights struggle in the United States. Examining only the
examples listed above, legal mobilization comprises activities as diverse as writing letters
(Barnes and Burke), the creation and contestation of legal meaning (Nolette), boycotts
(Coleman et al.), and various kinds of litigation (all).
2. See, for example, the exchange between McCann and Rosenberg in Law & Social Inquiry in 1996.
Who Is the Target of Legal Mobilization?
A further point of disagreement within the articles we reviewed deals with the
target of legal mobilization. In broad strokes, the target of legal mobilization may be
a private actor or a state actor. This divide relates to the one between traditional
litigation and public interest litigation. Traditional litigation refers to the bringing
of a lawsuit as “a vehicle for settling disputes between private parties about private
rights” (Chayes 1976, 1282), while public interest litigation refers to “civil rights
advocacy seeking to restructure public agencies” or public policies (Sabel and Simon
2004, 1016). The same division between public and private targets also applies when
considering a wider range of activities beyond litigation.
Among the articles reviewed, it was more common (eighteen articles) for the
primary target of legal mobilization to be the government—a state policy, institution,
or actor—than for the target to be a private actor (eight articles). Three articles
considered both types of targets, and twelve did not specify the target. For example,
several studies on sexual harassment, labor disputes, and workplace discrimination, such
as Amy Blackstone, Chris Uggen, and Heather McLaughlin (2009), Shannon Gleeson
(2009, 2010), and Jennifer Woodward (2015), examine the claims made against private
employers.3 Other studies, such as Michael Paris (2001), Lisa Vanhala (2012), and
Celeste Arrington (2014), focus on mobilization geared toward forcing the state to
enact, revise, or develop policies with respect to issues ranging from the funding of
schools and education reform to environmental protection to compensation for previ-
ous mistreatment by the state. Erin Adam (2017), in considering legal mobilization that
targeted both the state and private actors, describes various campaigns, including efforts
to promote marriage equality, access to financial aid, nondiscrimination in the work-
place, and immigration reform. Single organizations thus may be involved in multiple
campaigns with multiple targets.
What Claims Fall Within the Category of Legal Mobilization?
Related to the question of the target is the kind or kinds of claims that fall within
the category of legal mobilization. Zemans (1983) advocates for the consideration of
legal mobilization as a form of political participation, and recently scholars have begun
to echo her call (M. E. Gallagher 2006; M. Gallagher and Yang 2017; W. K. Taylor
2018). In this conception, a clear divide between self-interested, particularistic claims
and political claims is not viable. Though the initial grievance may be self-interested in
nature, the act of making a claim becomes political (Marshall 1998), and the fact of the
judiciary adjudicating the claim further cements the political nature of legal claims-
making. Further, claimants’ views about the law, about their problems, and even about
themselves may change through the process of making claims (McCann 1994). Even if
individuals or groups initiate a claim with only narrow self-interest in mind, their goals
may become more overtly political in nature as the process develops. The question here
becomes the extent to which intent matters relative to consequences.
3. Marshall (1998), focusing on sexual harassment, widened the lens to examine litigation against
both public and private employers—unlike the other studies cited here.
Still, it is possible to identify distinct categories, wherein a self-interested, particu-

laristic claim is one that only has direct consequences for the individual or group
advancing the claim—whether in court or outside of it—while a political claim has
consequences for those outside the named dispute. For instance, then, a particularistic
claim might involve litigation in which the primary legal question has already been
decided, and the plaintiffs are seeking a court order requiring compliance with a pre-
determined standard.4 Of the articles reviewed, twenty-three suggested an approach that
considered primarily the political nature of claims, while six focused more on self-
regarding claims. Three suggested both types of claims, and nine give no indication
as to the types of claims under investigation. Often, the type of claim was not stated,
and instead, we had to infer the nature of the claim from the empirical discussions
offered. Specifically, the author may show that the claims studied have political
consequences, but the act of mobilization is not always framed as a political act in itself.
We coded these as cases of political claims. In some cases, the determination is an easier
one. For example, Verónica Michel and Kathryn Sikkink (2013), Celeste Arrington
(2014), and Erin Adam (2017) explicitly focus on the use of legal mobilization to seek
accountability for government policy—whether gross violations of human rights,
maltreatment of those suffering from leprosy, or discrimination against immigrants.
A REVISED CONCEPTUALIZATION OF LEGAL MOBILIZATION
Legal Mobilization, Concept Formation, and Social Science Explanation
We provide an overview of the literature on concept formation to make apparent

the range of choices when conceptualizing legal mobilization. As Frederic Schaffer
(2015, 7) notes, scholars use the term “concept formation” to mean both “concept
reconstruction” and “concept elucidation.” Our goal is to “fashion precise conceptual
tools of the researcher’s design”—or reconstruction. Two well-established approaches in
the social sciences for conceptualization are the “necessary and sufficient conditions”
(NSC) approach and the family resemblances approach. Under the NSC approach,
“to define a concept is to give the conditions necessary and sufficient for something
to fit into the category” (Sartori 1970; Goertz 2006, 7). As opposed to NSC, the family
resemblance structure for concept formation does not require any necessary condition—
it is built on the logic of sufficiency (Goertz 2006; Wittgenstein 2010). There are three
ways in which the family resemblance structure can be built. The first indicates indi-
vidually sufficient conditions that are substitutable among each other. The second refers
to “INUS” conditions (Mahoney and Vanderpoel 2015, 79)—that is, conditions that
are individually unnecessary and insufficient, but that are necessary components of com-
binations of conditions that are themselves sufficient (Mackie 1980). The third—which
is not “purely” family resemblance, but a mixed structure—corresponds to the use of
one or more individually necessary conditions and one or more INUS or sufficient
conditions (Barrenechea and Castillo 2018). As such, the family resemblance structure
4. Of course, the act of shoring up jurisprudence may have longer-lasting impacts than anticipated, or a
surprising decision or dissent may result in changes down the line to this already-decided legal issue.
allows for multiple paths through which cases can be members of the set defined by a
particular concept.
Legal mobilization can be conceptualized following either of these approaches. For
instance, if one were to define legal mobilization exclusively as the use of litigation
against the state, there would be two individually necessary and jointly sufficient
conditions. With those conditions, legal mobilization necessarily implies (1) litigating
(2) against the state. If one actor is involved in litigation against another private actor,
that would not be an example of the concept under this definition. If an actor frames an
issue in legal terms, but does not litigate, that would also not be an instance of legal
mobilization according to this definition.5
Following the family resemblance approach, legal mobilization could instead be
defined through the use of INUS conditions. For example, constraining legal mobiliza-
tion to an act targeting the state, one could postulate that legal mobilization refers to
the use of legal framings or the use of litigation to bring about social change or the use of
legal education or any other related activity. This approach has not been explicitly used
to our knowledge. Instead, the dominant conceptual structure to define legal mobiliza-
tion has been a mixed one, in which the concept has one individually necessary
condition—the use of rights—and several nonspecified INUS conditions—for example,
the use of legal frames, litigation, and/or legal education. Under this conceptual struc-
ture, legal mobilization necessarily implies the use of rights claims, but the activities
through which, and the contexts under which, such claims are made can vary. In other
words, they are not individually essential components of the concept of legal mobiliza-
tion. This structure corresponds to Michael McCann’s (1994) use of the term legal
mobilization, though he did not develop his definition explicitly in these terms.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of adopting either of these approaches?
Conceptualizing legal mobilization through a family resemblance approach has at least
two advantages. First, this approach has been useful in bringing to the table the cen-
trality of law within contemporary mobilization. The flexibility of McCann’s “mixed”
approach to conceptualizing legal mobilization can help to explain the proliferation of
studies on legal mobilization in a wide variety of empirical scenarios and following dif-
ferent theoretical questions, from LGBT activism in Myanmar (Chua and Gilbert
2015), workplace disputes in China (M. Gallagher and Yang 2017), and claims by inter-
nally displaced people in Colombia (Rodríguez-Garavito and Rodríguez-Franco 2015).
This definition has allowed law and society scholars—and later social movement
scholars (Pedriana 2004, 2006; Meyer and Boutcher 2007; Boutcher and Stobaugh
2013)—to describe and theorize the role of law within mobilization. Second, a family
resemblance structure more readily allows for the possibility of causal heterogeneity
(Barrenechea and Castillo 2018), which is potentially useful considering the wide range
of activities and contexts investigated under the banner of legal mobilization.
However, the family resemblance approach to conceptualizing legal mobilization
also has significant drawbacks that are not found in the NSC approach. Most notably,
5. Indeed, these examples follow the logic of necessary conditions, which corresponds to the “*”
(or “AND”) operator in Boolean algebra. Bowman, Lehoucq, and Mahoney (2005) provide an overview
of the set-theoretic rules for concept aggregation. For a larger overview of set theory for the social sciences,
see Ragin (2008), Goertz and Mahoney (2012), and Schneider and Wagemann (2012).
the family resemblance approach is particularly vulnerable to conceptual stretching,

given its looser structure. As Giovanni Sartori (1970) argued, relaxing the bounds
of a concept increases its empirical coverage and can do so up to a point that leads
to conceptual stretching, wherein attempts to include more and more qualities render
a concept stretched beyond recognition and analytically useless (Goertz 2006). In the
case of scholarship on legal mobilization, one clear example of conceptual stretching is
apparent in studies that simultaneously consider litigation and letter-writing campaigns.
Are these activities comparable? Simply because the same actor engages in both does
not indicate that they are. The resources necessary to establish a letter-writing campaign
differ not only in quantity from those necessary for a litigation campaign, but they also
differ in kind. By collapsing both activities into one conceptual category, we run the risk
of obscuring important features of both litigation and letter-writing campaigns that may
differ across contexts or over time. The claim here is not that scholars should not study
letter-writing campaigns as well as litigation efforts, but that they should clearly and
carefully specify what is it that they are studying, distinguishing explanations for one
activity from explanations for the other, for their own benefit and for the benefit of
subsequent scholars who hope to build on, adapt, or further clarify the original study.
This concern with conceptual stretching has led scholars to emphasize analytic
differentiation, which allows for the possibility of theoretically capturing diverse forms
of empirical phenomena without blurring the boundaries between distinct phenomena
(Collier and Levitsky 1997). A strict conceptual structure that clearly delimits the con-
tours of legal mobilization through a theoretically justified set of individually necessary
and jointly sufficient conditions allows for increased attention to analytical differentia-
tion and conceptual clarity. This, in turn, allows scholars to more consistently build and
test theories across geographical and substantive areas, generating findings that more
easily lend themselves to systematic aggregation.
Furthermore, the NSC approach to conceptualize legal mobilization facilitates
causal inference. Though not all scholars are concerned with causal inference, it has
increasingly become the goal of social science research (King, Keohane, and Verba
1994; Brady and Collier 2010; Mahoney 2010; Gelman 2011; Goertz and Mahoney
2012; Morgan and Winship 2015). It has long been recognized that well-delimited def-
initions allow for causal assessment (Sartori 1975, 34; Linz 1985, 181–82; Karl 1990,
1–2; Alvarez et al. 1996, 4; Adcock and Collier 2001, 533). Within comparative-
historical analysis, for instance, using loosely defined concepts aggregated through a
family resemblance structure risks creating false analogies among different cases.
NSC conceptual structures are generally better suited to providing clear-cut demarca-
tions than family resemblance structures, and thus, they are better suited to facilitating
causal inference.
Finally, within the NSC approach to conceptualizing legal mobilization, it is
possible to use typologies to refine the concept and relate it to similar, but not identical,
phenomena. Concepts are not useful in isolation, but rather considered in broader
conceptual structures that tie together different, but related explanations of social
and political phenomena (Goertz 2006). Through the logic of kind hierarchies,
conceptual typologies allow researchers to situate “concepts within their semantic field,
that is, the constellation of related concepts and terms” (Collier, LaPorte, and
Seawright 2012, 222). The use of law is the basis of legal mobilization. It is also,
FIGURE 1.
Different Types of Uses of the Law in Mobilization.
however, important to related phenomena such as legal framing and legal conscious-
ness. A sound conceptualization of legal mobilization that promotes analytical differen-
tiation should be sensitive to its relationship with both legal framing and legal
consciousness, which would allow scholars to examine all three phenomena at once
while maintaining analytical differentiation.
In sum, there are important disagreements in how scholars have conceptualized
legal mobilization, which has led to conceptual stretching and a lack of analytical dif-
ferentiation. This has limited theory building and testing, as well as the aggregation of
findings across studies. The approach we propose not only overcomes these difficulties,
but it also facilitates causal inference (for those scholars interested in such a task) and
allows scholars to relate legal mobilization to kin, but distinct phenomena—specifically
legal consciousness and legal framing. In the next section we provide a typology to
address these conceptual relationships.
A Typological Approach to the Conceptualization of Legal Mobilization
The overarching concept of our typology is the use of law—either as discursive

symbols, binding rules, or institutional mechanisms. Following the NSC approach,
we identify three conditions that relate different uses of the law and that allow us
to distinguish between legal mobilization (LM), legal framing (LF), and legal conscious-
ness (LC). Figure 1 visually represents these conditions.
Figure 1 makes two aspects about our typological approach clear. First, legal
mobilization, legal framing, and legal consciousness are not mutually exclusive con-
cepts. They overlap between each other in complex ways that our approach is meant
to highlight, analytically dissect, and invite research on. Second, while not disjoint sets,
they are also not indistinguishable. This is also important, and our approach invites
analytical differentiation and research on the ways in which they relate to each other.
Our typology allows us to define legal mobilization as the use of law in an explicit, self-
conscious way through the invocation of a formal institutional mechanism, legal framing
as the use of law in an explicit, self-conscious way to give meaning to an event, and legal
consciousness as the implicit, nonarticulated use of law to give meaning to an event. As

previously mentioned, both individuals and different types of collective actors can
engage in these activities. These three concepts are different subtypes of an overarching
concept and each of them is defined by individually necessary and jointly sufficient
conditions—thus following the NSC approach to concept formation. They are different
in that although they are members of a superset, each of them is defined by the inter-
section between sets and the resulting intersections are mutually exclusive. Returning
to the set intersections, it is clear that there are instances of explicit, self-conscious invo-
cations of institutional mechanisms that rely on giving meaning to an event, whether in
an explicit, self-conscious way or not, as well as other possible intersections between
legal mobilization, legal framing, and legal consciousness.
The invocation of a formal institutional mechanism refers to the use of a venue
within the state to file a claim against another actor. This can be done through admin-
istrative procedures, quasi-judicial procedures, and litigation. For example, falling
within the category of administrative procedures are efforts to obtain welfare benefits,
as explored in Lucie White’s ethnography of Mrs. G.’s attempts to navigate the welfare
system to claim her rights (White 1990). Quasi-judicial procedures include formal com-
plaints processed by ombudsman’s offices and human rights or gender commissions.
Often, NGOs submit amicus briefs pertaining to these complaints or otherwise mobilize
around these commissions. Catalina Smulovitz and Enrique Peruzzotti (2000) note the
importance of ombudsman’s offices and similar commissions throughout Latin America.
Although litigation might come to mind first when one thinks of formal institutional
mechanisms, it is actually only one subset of the formal institutional mechanisms
through which people file claims.
More generally, the choice to engage with the state, particularly through the
circumscribed channels of legal institutions, legal rules, and legal mechanisms, has
important implications. Formal institutional mechanisms bring with them organiza-
tional complexities that claimants need to navigate, for which they need resources,
and which they typically only navigate after assessing opportunities and threats.
Although domination and resistance is not limited to any one institutional field and
different forms of mobilization occur across these various fields (Edelman and
Suchman 1997; Armstrong and Bernstein 2008; Edelman, Leachman, and McAdam
2010; McDonnell, King, and Soule 2015), the particular domain of legal mobilization
is the formal legal sphere. Broadening legal mobilization to other institutional fields
would bring lead to conceptual stretching. It is furthermore not theoretically warranted
as the mechanisms and processes we expect to operate as social actors invoke the legal
institutions of the state are not the same as those when they invoke other social insti-
tutions. Invoking administrative procedures, quasi-judicial procedures, and courts all
involve the framing of legal opportunities, for example, while this is not the case in
other institutional fields. The LGBT movement is a relevant example: When mobilizing
against the restriction of marriage for heterosexual couples, it turned to legal
mobilization and, while invoking the legal institutions of the state, it did so through
the mechanisms we would expect, such as the framing of legal opportunities
(Andersen 2009). However, when mobilizing against other institutions, such as the
medical establishment, it turned to direct action (e.g., ACT UP), involving other
mechanisms of bodily rhetoric and emotions (DeLuca 1999; Gould 2002).
Considering the broad range of formal institutional mechanisms that exist, it is

important that scholars specify the mechanism under study and spell out the substantive
and theoretical consequences of its structure. Janice Gallagher’s study of legal mobili-
zation against impunity in Colombia and Mexico is an excellent case in point
(J. Gallagher 2017). She disaggregates the judicial process in both countries in whether
(1) the legal case is filed, but there is no evidence of investigation; (2) there are con-
crete investigatory advances and thus indictment; (3) there is a trial; and (4) there is a
conviction of at least one party. By specifying the formal institutional mechanisms,
Gallagher is able to better assess the conditions under which civil society groups are
effective at fighting impunity in homicide cases. Other institutional designs would
require different specifications. Furthermore, given the organizational complexity of
the state and the variety of nonjudicial and quasi-judicial formal institutional mecha-
nisms, there is all the more reason to clearly specify the formal institutional mechanism
under examination.
By “giving meaning to an event,” we mean the explicit, self-conscious or implicit,
nonarticulated use of legal rules, discourses, or symbols to understand and frame the
social world. At times, this may entail references to formal legal institutions, and at
other times, this may entail references to legal tropes detached from any particular insti-
tutional structure. These understandings may be constructed, adapted, and disseminated
strategically, as is the case with legal framing. On the other hand, they may arise from
everyday experiences in what appears to be a decentralized or uncoordinated manner.6
Further, the process of conferring meaning onto an event may prompt further action of a
specific kind (or limit future actions).
Finally, we distinguish “explicit, self-conscious” and “implicit, nonarticulated”
from the perspective of the actor using the law. In including the distinction between
“explicit, self-conscious” and “implicit, nonarticulated” action, we seek to differentiate
the active, articulated, explicit, and intentional components of legal mobilization and
legal framing from commonplace, taken for granted, received, and naturalized under-
standings of the world that may be consequential for action or inaction but are not
chosen as such. These commonplace understandings fall within our conceptualization
of legal consciousness. In the domain of culture, the distinction between “explicit,
self-conscious” and “implicit, nonarticulated” builds on Jean Comaroff and John
Comaroff’s (2008, 22–24) distinction between ideology and hegemony. The latter refers
to those cultural elements that “come to be taken-for-granted as the natural and
received shape of the world and everything that inhabits it,” while the former refers
to “an articulated system of meanings . . . [b]orne in explicit manifestos and everyday
practices, self-conscious texts and spontaneous images, popular styles and political plat-
forms.” Thus, concerning the distinction between legal framing and legal consciousness,
“explicit, self-conscious” points to the former involving the active awareness in the use
of the law to give meaning to an event, while “implicit, nonarticulated” points to the
latter involving more of a received habit in the use of the law to give meaning to an
event. While actors may make choices about how to engage with the world as a
6. That these understandings and experiences appear to be decentralized or uncoordinated is key here.
As Susan Silbey (2005) and others have pointed out, this appearance may disguise an underlying hegemonic
structure.
consequence of their legal consciousness, they do not choose to adopt a particular posi-
tioning or consciousness as such. In contrast, actors do actively choose to adopt and
perpetuate a particular legal frame or to turn to the formal legal system to advance a
claim, thus engaging in legal mobilization. The adoption of a specific legal frame
and the choice to engage in legal mobilization can be usefully thought of as consequen-
ces of legal consciousness; this is something our approach invites scholars to investigate.
Clearly, engaging in self-conscious action can take place within the context of formal
legal institutions or outside of them. Self-conscious action may or may not include
explicitly or consciously giving meaning to an event. For instance, the invocation of
a formal institutional mechanism, such as an administrative procedure, may appear
to the parties involved to be routine and not to confer any particular meaning onto
the dispute in question.
An example can help to clarify the distinction between explicit, self-conscious and
implicit, nonarticulated, as well as the complex interrelationship among legal framing,
legal consciousness, and legal mobilization. A working class person of color may be
socialized into thinking of the law as a repressive system in an unconscious way; this
would fall into our category of implicit, nonarticulated use of the law to give meaning
to an event, and thus forming part of the concept of legal consciousness. At the same
time, an activist from a privileged background—who might see the law as a useful tool
for emancipation by default—may propose a campaign depicting the law as repressive to
underprivileged communities in an effort to raise funds for her organization; this would
fall into our category of explicit, self-conscious use of the law to give meaning to an
event, and thus as part of the concept of legal framing. Clearly, in both cases the person
of color or the privileged activist can choose to invoke a formal institutional mechanism
at some point based on their understanding of the law, thus overlapping with our
concept of legal mobilization. Once they have invoked a formal institutional mecha-
nism, both the person of color and the privileged activist may change the way they
use the law to give meaning to events. Within the legal system, the person of color
can realize she might be more likely to obtain a favorable result by depicting the
law as aimed at seeking justice and equality rather than as a repressive system (here
explicitly and self-consciously giving meaning by using the law, or engaging in legal
framing). Following her encounters with the legal system, the privileged activist may
come to unconsciously think of the law as repressive, even though this was not her
“default” understanding before (in other words, resulting in a change to her legal
consciousness).
Our typology thus facilitates the sound conceptualization of legal mobilization and
relates it from kin but not equivalent concepts, legal consciousness and legal framing,
that sociolegal and social movement scholars may have an interest in. Our goal is not to
artificially divorce these concepts from one another, but to better understand the ways
in which they do and do not overlap. These concepts often overlap more in common
usage than in our typology, and this occurs in ways that may actually impede the
research process, encouraging the conflation of different types of actions as if they were
equal for substantive and theoretical purposes. Attention to these conceptual dimen-
sions—whether or not the object of study involves giving meaning to an event; explicit,
self-conscious action; and/or the invocation of formal institutions—will allow scholars
to be more sensitive moving forward to conceptual clarity and transparency, taking care
to use the term that best describes what they actually mean. We argue that our concepts
of legal mobilization, legal framing, and legal consciousness capture crucial aspects of
current scholarly usage and best situate scholars to develop emerging lines of inquiry
in the field of sociolegal studies. However, we do not claim that our approach is fully
in line with all current usage, which not only would be impossible, but also against the
purpose of this article; we make conceptual choices in our approach, which we are
arguing for as desirable.
There are three primary strands of discord in the extant literature on legal mobili-
zation, including which activities constitute legal mobilization, who is the target, and
what types of claims fall within the category. As we argue in more detail below, there are
important theoretical reasons to restrict legal mobilization to the use of law in an
explicit, self-conscious way through the invocation of formal institutional mechanisms.
Our conceptualization takes a clear position on the issue that has arguably been the
most contentious—that is, which activities constitute legal mobilization. In our concep-
tualization, these activities include litigation as well as the filing of claims through
pseudo-judicial and administrative legal procedures.
Our typology also leads us to take a clear position on the two secondary points of
discord within existing accounts of legal mobilization regarding the target and nature
of claims. We acknowledge that even legal mobilization aimed at changing the behavior
of private actors necessarily involves state institutions and state actors, and thus the
divide between state-directed action and private-directed action is perhaps more porous
than might be imagined. Also, the invocation of formal institutional mechanisms
against private actors, whether it involves political issues or not, is likely to involve
similar mechanisms to those involved in targeting the state (McAdam, Tarrow, and
Tilly 2001). For example, two of those mechanisms are the perception of legal oppor-
tunities or the mobilization of resources, which are required regardless of whether the
target is a private actor or the state or whether the objective is political or not. Thus, the
fact that we expect similar mechanisms operating across these scenarios provides a the-
oretical rationale for including the invocation of formal institutional mechanisms
against private actors in our definition of legal mobilization, as well as for not restricting
it based on the type of claims made.
Further, our conceptualization facilitates the study of legal mobilization from the
“top down,” with a focus on judges and courts, as well as from the “bottom up,” with a
focus on potential claimants. Scholars often adopt these approaches on the basis of dif-
ferent research goals and different starting assumptions, but a common conceptualiza-
tion of legal mobilization will allow scholars of each persuasion to communicate more
effectively with one another and to develop and combine findings across research
traditions.
To sum up, scholars using the concept of legal mobilization have not always been
self-conscious or transparent about their conceptual choices. We seek to encourage self-
conscious reflection on what exactly it is that we are studying, which is an important
goal for social scientists. We hold that the NSC approach to concept formation best
situates scholars to clearly specify their concepts and differentiate them from similar
or related phenomena. Although some scholars might interpret this as detaching legal
mobilization from contextual factors, this is not the case. Studies should still have a
broad empirical scope and be open to capturing the complex relations between legal
mobilization and other phenomena. What we are arguing for is analytical differentiation
among them, which will actually promote a better understanding of legal mobilization
in relation to its contextual factors.
DEEPENING EMERGING AVENUES FOR RESEARCH
We now turn to a discussion of how the conceptualization of legal mobilization as

the use of law in an explicit, self-conscious way through the invocation of a formal insti-
tutional mechanism has important theoretical implications. In doing so, we show how
our conceptualization best situates scholars to respond to and develop new lines of
inquiry raised by recent studies on law and social movements. Further, we demonstrate
how our conceptualization will allow scholars to capitalize on cross-fertilization between
the fields of social movement and sociolegal studies. In addition to allowing for better
theory building and testing, aggregation across studies, causal inference, and relating
legal mobilization to kin phenomena, two additional concrete benefits of our proposed
definition are that it will help scholars develop new lines of inquiry and draw bridges
between social movement and sociolegal studies.
In the last fifteen years, one of the more dynamic strands of research on law and
social movements has been the literature on legal opportunity structures (Hilson 2002;
B. M. Wilson and Rodríguez Cordero 2006; Andersen 2009; B. M. Wilson 2009; Evans
Case and Givens 2010; De Fazio 2012; Vanhala 2012, 2017). Legal opportunities refer
to those dimensions of the legal system that increase actors’ likelihood of using litigation
and being successful in doing so. Those dimensions include structural (or stable) and
contingent (or variable) features, although this distinction has proven hard to sustain
(Vanhala 2012). Among the structural dimensions are laws on standing and access,
legal funding, the available legal stock, and courts’ operating rules on legal formality.
The contingent variables include the configuration of power among judges or justices
and judicial receptivity. Legal opportunity structures have been used as an independent
variable to account for why movements turn to litigation instead of lobbying or protest-
ing (Hilson 2002; De Fazio 2012), to specify the circumstances under which rights
claims are more or less likely to prevail in court (Andersen 2009), to explain the miti-
gated need for extensive resources for mobilization (B. M. Wilson 2009), and to account
for the power of political minorities to realize their rights (B. M. Wilson and Rodríguez
Cordero 2006). Finally, the legal opportunity structure has also been used as the depen-
dent variable in studies that deal with legal change (Evans Case and Givens 2010;
Vanhala 2012).
We argue that these studies on legal opportunities have given rise to theoretical
questions that might be better addressed by our strict definition of legal mobilization
structured by the NSC approach. First, if the legal opportunity structure is to be used
to explain why actors recur to litigation instead of lobbying, then a clear-cut delimita-
tion between legal mobilization and lobbying should be drawn. If actors use both
litigation and lobbying in the same campaign—as has been the case, for instance, in
campaigns for marriage equality in several countries—then scholars would need to
account for the use of two different strategies and understand their relationship and
different dynamics (e.g., the resources required, the kind(s) of organizing in which
collective actors engage, and so on). Second, if the legal opportunity structure is to be
useful for the specification of the conditions under which actors are likely to prevail in
courts or in accounting for political minorities’ power to push their rights, then legal
mobilization has to be distinguished from both legal framing and legal consciousness.
Indeed, it is likely to be the case that the legal framing employed by these actors
and the legal consciousness embodied by them also affect these outcomes, and thus dis-
tinguishing these phenomena from legal mobilization is crucial to assessing their relative
impact.
Another set of studies that has advanced our understanding of law and social
change focuses on legal framing (Pierceson 2005; Pedriana 2006; McCammon et al.
2007; Leachman 2013; Vanhala 2017). Legal framing refers to the inclusion of legal
rules, ideas, or symbols in collective action frames. It is thus a subset of the concept
of collective action frames within social movement scholarship, which refers to
“action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities
and campaigns of a social movement organization” (Benford and Snow 2000, 614;
Snow and Benford 1988). Scholars have noted the pervasiveness of legal framing
and its importance to describe movements’ framing activities, transformations, and
reform objectives (Pedriana 2006). Recent studies have used the concept of legal fram-
ing as an independent variable to account for courts’ varying approaches to particular
policy questions (Pierceson 2005), the likelihood of NGOs recurring to litigation to
pursue their policy goals (Vanhala 2017), and collective actors’ likelihood of influenc-
ing political decision makers to reform policies (McCammon et al. 2007). Finally,
scholars have also distinguished different kinds of legal frames and taken them as a
dependent variable, focusing on how the internal cultures of movements and their insti-
tutional environments shape the adoption and utility of a particular kind of frame
(Leachman 2013).
Our strict definition of legal mobilization structured following the NSC approach
also facilitates the exploration of questions raised by recent studies on legal framing.
First, if scholars wish to study the impact of legal frames on actors’ ability to influence
policy makers (including legislators, government officials, and judges) and courts’ dif-
ferential approaches (e.g., more or less “aggressive,” “activist,” or “interventionist”) to
policy questions, then a distinction between legal framing and legal mobilization must
be drawn to study their relative impact. By defining legal mobilization as the use of law
in an explicit, self-conscious way through the invocation of a formal institutional mech-
anism, rather than the mere use of rights claims, scholars will be better placed to specify
the importance of legal framing for actors’ success in legal mobilization in relation to
other key factors. Second, if legal frames are to be used to help explain the likelihood of
actors investing in litigation instead of other strategies, then a clear-cut distinction
between legal framing and legal mobilization is necessary. To address this question, legal
frames can refer to the explicit, self-conscious use of law to give meaning to an
event and legal mobilization to the explicit, self-conscious invocation of formal
institutional mechanisms. By analytically differentiating these phenomena, it is then
possible to assess the impact of variation in the use of legal frames by actors on legal
mobilization.
Finally, we propose that recent studies on legal consciousness have suggested
promising new questions to pursue. Sociolegal scholars have broadly defined legal
consciousness as “the ways people understand and use the law . . . the way people con-
ceive of the ‘natural’ and normal way of doing things, their habitual patterns of talk and
action, and their common-sense understanding of the world” (Merry 1990, 5). Studies
on legal consciousness have developed as a dedicated subfield within law and society
scholarship, and the questions addressed in it are too varied for us to adequately capture
them here (though see Ewick and Silbey 1998; Silbey 2005 for overviews). Recently,
scholars have examined how legal consciousness is affected by their experiences with
litigation (M. E. Gallagher 2006), how legal consciousness reproduces the law’s legiti-
macy (Silbey 2005; J. C. Wilson 2011), and what kinds of legal consciousness are or are
not conducive to legal mobilization (W. K. Taylor 2018).
We suggest that a clearer definition of legal mobilization and a deeper investigation
into the relationship between legal consciousness and legal mobilization are needed to
address the questions posed by these studies. Considering that legal consciousness
involves the possibility of mobilization—and the literature actually focuses on both
understandings and uses of the law—there is an important, but undertheorized, overlap
between legal mobilization and legal consciousness. Generally speaking, studies of legal
consciousness are more focused on how individuals or groups think about their engage-
ment with legal actors, institutions, and tools rather than on the conditions under
which they actually invoke formal institutional mechanisms to make claims.
Importantly, legal consciousness is as much about when actors view problems in their
lives as falling outside the domain of the law or when actors do not think about the law
in the first place as about when actors view those problems as fundamentally legal in
nature (Nielsen 2000). The exact relationship between these unconscious or subcon-
scious elements of legal consciousness and whether, when, and how actors mobilize law
remains to be identified in future research. We hold that precisely because of this exist-
ing definitional ambiguity between legal consciousness and legal mobilization around
the question of the use of law, scholars interested in exploring the relationship between
these two topics have a stake in clearly conceptualizing both phenomena. Our NSC
approach to defining legal mobilization helps to clarify the differences between legal
mobilization and legal consciousness.
CONCLUSIONS
We began this article by highlighting a paradoxical situation. Although social

movements have increasingly used legal strategies (Meyer and Boutcher 2007), we lack
a general theory to account for the relations between social movements, the courts, and
legal systems (Tarrow 2012). Because well-defined concepts are the building blocks of
theories (Goertz 2006), we have focused on how to best conceptualize legal mobiliza-
tion. Indeed, as we have demonstrated, scholars working in the sociolegal tradition dis-
agree (sometimes in fundamental ways) about what constitutes legal mobilization,
which has resulted in conceptual slippage around how the term is used in contemporary
scholarship. This paradoxical situation is of particular concern since the specific ques-
tions about legal mobilization we highlighted touch upon larger, important discussions
in social theory about law and power. Specifically, they point to the role of law in per-
petuating the status quo, as well as the conditions under which resistance occurs
(Bourdieu 1986; Poulantzas 2000; Thompson 2016). The broader theoretical problem,
connected to social movements and contentious politics, is that of the reproduction and
change in social fields (Fligstein and McAdam 2015).
Formalizing definitions and seeking systematic theory building is crucial for
scholars interested in legal mobilization. Both are necessary to reach valid conclusions
and for knowledge to cumulate (Gerring 2011). For practice-oriented researchers, better
theories foster better problem solving (Prasad 2018); it is only by having valid knowl-
edge on the factors driving the social phenomena in which we seek to intervene that we
can make more effective interventions.
Some scholars might argue that rather than working to formalize a common
definition of legal mobilization, authors investigating these related topics should simply
use the term legal mobilization to refer to a general research paradigm, or that these
authors could just be more forthright about how they understand legal mobilization
and, for example, legal opportunity relative to existing studies. At the extreme, this
position would hold that there is no better or worse definition of legal mobilization,
but rather various definitions for different research purposes. These suggestions are
plausible for the discrete production of academic texts, but they are lacking if the goal
is to develop a coherent, additive research agenda across scholars, disciplines, and issue
areas. We argue for a standardized definition, which will allow for more meaningful
theoretical debates about legal mobilization, as well as better understanding of other
sociolegal phenomena by promoting exploration guided by analytical differentiation.
This article contributes to sociolegal and social movement scholarship by concep-
tualizing legal mobilization within a typology of different uses of the law that can take
place during mobilization by individual or collective actors or outside it. We define legal
mobilization as the use of law in an explicit, self-conscious way through the invocation of
a formal institutional mechanism. Distinctly, we define legal consciousness as the
implicit, nonarticulated use of law to give meaning to an event, and legal framing as
the explicit, self-conscious use of law to give meaning to an event. We further show
how such a conceptualization better positions both sociolegal and social movement
scholars to address questions raised by the emerging literatures on legal opportunity
structures, legal framing, and legal consciousness.
We encourage scholars engaging with legal mobilization to take our concern with
sound conceptualization seriously. Careful attention to how we specify what it is that we
are studying will not limit our ability to creatively approach new empirical phenomena,
nor will it limit the kinds of questions we can ask about the world. Instead, the opposite
is true. Rather than recurring to underdeveloped conceptual starting points or drawing
incommensurate conclusions, with a sound conceptualization of legal mobilization, we
will be able to generate deeper understanding of the diverse ways in which social actors
use the law across time and across contexts. We hope that both sociolegal and social
movement scholars will embrace our conceptualization, which draws on the necessary
and sufficient conditions structure.
We close by noting opportunities for future research and cross-fertilization between
the fields of sociolegal studies and social movement studies that would benefit from our
rigorous conceptualization of legal mobilization. Ultimately, the payoffs of our approach
will come from empirical research informed by it. By restricting legal mobilization to
litigation and differentiating it from legal framing and legal consciousness, our definition
is well suited for use in future studies involving legal opportunities (Hilson 2002;
B. M. Wilson and Rodríguez Cordero 2006; Andersen 2009; B. M. Wilson 2009;
Evans Case and Givens 2010; De Fazio 2012; Vanhala 2012, 2017; Arrington
2019): When do actors turn to legal mobilization instead of other tactics such as
lobbying or protesting? When are actors likely to prevail in courts? Our definition based
on necessary and sufficient conditions is also well suited for use by scholars interested in
further investigating questions raised by studies on legal framing (Pierceson 2005;
Pedriana 2006; McCammon et al. 2007; Leachman 2013; Vanhala 2017): How does
variation in legal framing impact actors’ success with legal mobilization? How does
variation in the use of legal frames relate to the conditions under which actors turn
to legal mobilization to advance claims? Recent studies on legal consciousness and legal
mobilization (M. E. Gallagher 2006; J. C. Wilson 2011; W. K. Taylor 2018) also point
to questions that our clear-cut definition is well suited to address: What are the partic-
ular configurations of legal consciousness that lead to legal mobilization? How is legal
consciousness affected by the process of legal mobilization?
Further, legal mobilization under authoritarianism is a growing area of empirical
research in which a more systematic conceptualization would improve efforts at com-
parative understanding. Although scholars have made significant inroads into the study
of courts in authoritarian regimes (e.g., Ginsburg and Moustafa 2008), much less is
known about claims-making practices in these contexts. While scholars have begun
to examine these claims-making processes in China (M. E. Gallagher 2006;
M. Gallagher and Yang 2017), Hong Kong (Tam 2012), Russia (Hendley 1999; van
der Vet 2018), as well as Myanmar and Singapore (Chua 2014; Chua and Gilbert
2015), they have done so in a largely particularistic manner and have drawn on differ-
ent understandings of legal mobilization that do not readily aggregate together.
Relatedly, scholars have yet to consider potential differences between legal mobilization
in common and civil law systems, or to investigate the extent to which these different
institutional environments condition the ability and proclivity of actors to engage in
legal mobilization in both democratic and authoritarian contexts. As is the case with
legal opportunities, legal framing, and legal consciousness, we hold that our definition of
legal mobilization best situates scholars interested in legal mobilization in authoritarian
contexts to develop general theories and cumulative knowledge about the intersection
of law and mobilization across geographic contexts and substantive issue areas.
Interestingly, several of the directions for future research we have pointed to
converge on the significance of thinking of legal mobilization as a member of a larger
repertoire of contention. Within social movement scholarship, repertoires of collective
action refer to “the ways that people act together in pursuit of shared interests”
(Tilly 2015, 41). It is important to keep in mind that our concept of legal mobilization
also includes its use by individuals, while the concept of repertoires of contention only
covers collective actors. However, within the latter, conceptualizing legal mobilization
as one element within the set of ways people act together in pursuit of shared interests
might be useful to unify different research agendas and possibly think in new ones. Tilly
(1978, 2010) theorized the way in which repertoires of contention vary as a function of
political regimes. Thinking of legal mobilization as an element of such repertoires raises
the question of its predominant use within democratic regimes, but also of its increasing
usage in authoritarian regimes, as well as the commonalities and differences.
Furthermore, scholars studying repertoires of contention are also interested in

how particular tactics are chosen and change during events of contention (Alimi
2015). The factors that influence these choices merit further study (V. Taylor and
Van Dyke 2004). It is useful to conceptualize legal mobilization as one of the many
possible tactics that actors can chose from, including protest, lobbying, petitioning,
marches, strikes, demonstrations, engaging in violent acts, rituals, and performances.
Legal mobilization is best described as a subtype of institutional tactics (Field 1976;
Scott 1990; O’Brien and Li 2006), and future scholarship should examine when partic-
ular institutional tactics are chosen, as well as the relationship between institutional and
extrainstitutional tactics.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/

lsi.2019.59
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Law&

Law & Social Inquiry Social

the visible extent of organizational and strategic emulation is striking. The

Emilio Lehoucq ([email protected]) is a PhD Student at Northwestern University. He has

© 2019 American Bar Foundation. 1

Tarrow’s call for a general theory is as desirable as it is ambitious. Systematic theory

theoretically coherent way to conceptualize legal mobilization within the ﬁelds of

DISAGREEMENTS ABOUT HOW TO CONCEPTUALIZE LEGAL

actor, or an individual. And importantly, both noncoordinated and coordinated indi-

Which Activities Constitute Legal Mobilization?

Who Is the Target of Legal Mobilization?

What Claims Fall Within the Category of Legal Mobilization?

Still, it is possible to identify distinct categories, wherein a self-interested, particu-

A REVISED CONCEPTUALIZATION OF LEGAL MOBILIZATION

Legal Mobilization, Concept Formation, and Social Science Explanation

We provide an overview of the literature on concept formation to make apparent

the family resemblance approach is particularly vulnerable to conceptual stretching,

A Typological Approach to the Conceptualization of Legal Mobilization

The overarching concept of our typology is the use of law—either as discursive

consciousness as the implicit, nonarticulated use of law to give meaning to an event. As

Considering the broad range of formal institutional mechanisms that exist, it is

DEEPENING EMERGING AVENUES FOR RESEARCH

We now turn to a discussion of how the conceptualization of legal mobilization as

We began this article by highlighting a paradoxical situation. Although social

Furthermore, scholars studying repertoires of contention are also interested in

To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/

Adam, Erin M. “Intersectional Coalitions: The Paradoxes of Rights-Based Movement Building in

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