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Does invoking law empower social movements or entrench existing hierarchies? This question lies at the heart of legal mobilization scholarship, a subfield of law and society that examines how individuals and groups use law to pursue social change. Legal mobilization is not simply the study of litigation; it encompasses the full range of ways people engage with legal institutions, discourses, and rights—from filing a complaint to organizing a campaign around a constitutional claim. The subfield has evolved through a series of frameworks that each reframed the relationship between law, power, and collective action.
Legal mobilization’s intellectual roots lie in the early twentieth-century revolt against legal formalism. Sociological Jurisprudence, associated with Roscoe Pound, argued that law should be understood as a tool for social engineering rather than a closed system of rules. It insisted that legal scholars attend to the social effects of law, opening the door to empirical inquiry. Legal Realism, flourishing from the 1920s to the 1970s, radicalized this insight. Realists like Karl Llewellyn and Jerome Frank attacked the notion that judicial decisions followed deductive logic, showing that law was indeterminate and shaped by judges’ biases and social context. These frameworks did not directly study mobilization, but they provided the foundational skepticism about law’s neutrality that later mobilization scholars would inherit. They also established the premise that law is a social phenomenon—malleable, contested, and embedded in power relations.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Dispute Processing Framework shifted attention from courts to the pathways individuals take when they experience grievances. Scholars like Richard Abel and Laura Nader mapped the “dispute pyramid”—the process by which an injury becomes a claim, then a dispute, and only rarely a lawsuit. This framework was individualistic: it focused on how personal problems were transformed (or not) into legal cases. It revealed that most grievances never reach a lawyer, let alone a courtroom, and that access to law is stratified by class, race, and gender. Dispute processing provided the first systematic empirical picture of legal mobilization at the micro level, but it treated mobilization largely as a series of individual decisions, not as collective or political action.
Legal Mobilization Theory emerged in the 1980s as a direct response to the limitations of dispute processing. Frances Kahn Zemans’s 1983 article “Legal Mobilization: The Neglected Role of the Law in the Political System” argued that law is a resource that citizens can activate—a “translation” of grievances into legal claims. Zemans retained the individualistic focus but added a political dimension: legal mobilization is a form of political participation. Michael McCann’s 1994 book Rights at Work transformed the field with a constitutive approach. McCann studied pay equity activism and showed that law works not only through direct court victories but by shaping consciousness, framing demands, and building movement infrastructure. He argued that rights are “constitutive”—they create meanings and identities that enable collective action, even when litigation fails. This framework absorbed dispute processing’s concern with grievance pathways but expanded it to include collective actors, social movements, and the symbolic power of law. Legal Mobilization Theory became the subfield’s central paradigm, and it remains so today.
At the same time that Legal Mobilization Theory was developing, Critical Legal Studies (CLS) launched a devastating critique of rights. CLS scholars, building on Legal Realism, argued that law is fundamentally indeterminate and that rights discourse legitimates inequality by offering false promises of justice. For CLS, legal mobilization was a trap: it channels radical energy into reformist battles that leave underlying power structures intact. This created a sharp tension within the subfield. If rights are inherently co-optive, why study mobilization at all? McCann’s constitutive theory offered a partial answer: rights can be both hegemonic and empowering, depending on how they are used. The debate between CLS’s rights critique and the mobilization scholars’ defense of rights consciousness became a defining intellectual struggle of the 1990s. Today, most mobilization scholars accept that law is double-edged—it can constrain as well as enable—but they reject CLS’s totalizing dismissal, insisting that the empirical question is when and how law matters for movements.
Feminist Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively, and both engaged deeply with legal mobilization. Feminist scholars like Catharine MacKinnon argued that law is a site of gender hierarchy, but they also saw litigation as a tool for change—for example, in campaigns against sexual harassment and for reproductive rights. CRT scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the concept of intersectionality to show how race, gender, and class interact in legal claims. Both frameworks coexisted with CLS but rejected its wholesale rejection of rights. Instead, they insisted that marginalized groups can use law to articulate demands and build movements, even while recognizing law’s limitations. These frameworks enriched Legal Mobilization Theory by showing that mobilization is always shaped by multiple axes of identity and power. They also pushed the subfield to attend to the specific strategies of women’s and racial justice movements, such as the use of impact litigation and legal advocacy organizations.
From the 1990s onward, Empirical Legal Studies (ELS) brought quantitative and qualitative methods to bear on legal mobilization questions. ELS scholars tested hypotheses about litigation rates, case outcomes, and the effects of legal reforms. This methodological school narrowed the focus to measurable phenomena, sometimes at the expense of the interpretive depth that McCann’s constitutive approach valued. At the same time, Legal Consciousness Research, pioneered by Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey in The Common Place of Law (1998), examined how ordinary people understand and use law in everyday life. Legal consciousness studies revealed that most people see law as remote, powerful, and not for them—a finding that explained low rates of mobilization. This framework coexisted with Legal Mobilization Theory, offering a micro-level complement to the macro-level focus on movements. Together, ELS and Legal Consciousness Research transformed the subfield by grounding mobilization in empirical evidence about behavior and meaning-making.
The turn of the century brought a new framework: Transnational Legal Mobilization. As globalization accelerated, scholars began studying how activists use international human rights law, regional courts, and transnational advocacy networks to pressure states. This framework extended Legal Mobilization Theory beyond the nation-state, examining campaigns around climate change, indigenous rights, and corporate accountability. It also absorbed insights from Legal Pluralism, recognizing that law operates in multiple overlapping orders. Transnational Legal Mobilization is currently one of the most vibrant areas of the subfield, reflecting the reality that many contemporary movements operate across borders.
Legal mobilization research today is characterized by pluralism. No single framework dominates. Legal Mobilization Theory remains the core paradigm, but it is routinely combined with Legal Consciousness Research to study how rights are understood on the ground, with Empirical Legal Studies to test causal claims, and with Transnational Legal Mobilization to address global dynamics. Critical frameworks—CLS, Feminist Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory—continue to inform the subfield’s normative debates, especially the question of whether law is co-optive or transformative. The most active debate today centers on this very tension: scholars like McCann argue that law can be a resource for progressive change, while critics point to the ways legal mobilization reinforces neoliberal governance and depoliticizes social movements. The subfield has not resolved this debate, but it has learned to treat it as an empirical and strategic question rather than a philosophical one. The leading frameworks—Legal Mobilization Theory, Legal Consciousness Research, Transnational Legal Mobilization, and Empirical Legal Studies—each offer tools for investigating different facets of the puzzle. The result is a rich, methodologically diverse field that continues to ask: when does law empower, and when does it entrench?