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The Structural Context of Novel Rights Claims: Southern Civil Rights Organizing, 1961-1966

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Francesca Polletta
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Abstract

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Theorists of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) have argued that the abstract, individualistic, and state-dependent character of rights makes them of dubious value for groups fighting for social change. Southern civil rights organizers in the early 1960s engaged in the kind of power-oriented strategy that CLS writers advocate in lieu of a rights-oriented one. However, the rights claims they made inside and outside courtrooms were essential to their political organizing efforts. Far from narrowing collective aspirations to the limits of the law, activists' extension of rights claims to the “unqualified” legitimated assaults on economic inequality, governmental decisionmaking in poverty programs, and the Vietnam War. What made possible this novel formulation was not only the multivalent character of rights but also key features of the social, political, and organizational contexts within which rights were advanced.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , 2000 , pp. 367 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Law and Society Association

Footnotes

The author wishes to thank Linda Catalano, Lynn Chancer, Patricia Ewick, David Greenberg, Susan Silbey, Abigail Saguy, Amy Schindler, Marc Steinberg, Alex Vitale, members of the Lazarsfeld Law and Society Workshop, and two anonymous reviewers from Law & Society Review for valuable comments and suggestions, and Linda Catalano for able research assistance.

References

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