The role of social movements and civil society actors in rights advancement has been frequently emphasised. The assumption is that legal mobilisation by civil society actors works towards the extension of rights and the emancipation and advancement of justice for distinctive (minority) groups in society. While traditionally, socio-legal attention on social movement and civil society actions around rights promotion was particularly prominent in the US, for some time now the European context has also been approached from such a socio-legal lens. However, a one-sided, liberal–progressive understanding of social mobilisation around rights has, importantly, been put to the test by recent manifestations of societal actors. Conservative actors tend to (1) promote a restrictive interpretation or a radical reinterpretation of existing rights (e.g. abortion, free speech), (2) limit the diffusion of new rights (e.g. the rights to euthanasia or legalizing surrogate maternity) and/or (3) call for the interruption of the further extensions of rights (e.g. with regard to same-sex marriage, LGBTIQ issues). The analysis of legal mobilisation by such conservative right-wing actors indicates that mobilisational repertoires are strikingly similar to those of liberal actors. This article will discuss the notions of civil society and legal mobilisation and call for a rethinking of these concepts, in part because of the increasing manifestation of societal actors that are in contrast to the traditional liberal paradigm. The article will subsequently engage in a detailed study of one such actor – the Polish legal think tank Ordo Iuris (OI) – with regard to its third-party or amicus curiae interventions at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), stressing the difference of orientation of such interventions from those of liberal actors and also indicating dimensions of ambivalence and similarity in their approaches.

Though the Polish rule of law crisis has been on the scholarly agenda since the Law and Justice Party (PiS) took power in 2015, the individual agents of legal disruption within the judiciary have been largely off the radar. This intervention aims to fill this gap. This article analyses the legal mobilisation practices of the Supreme Court (SC) judges appointed by the PiS party in a court-packing manner after 2017. It is argued that this is a specific type of legal mobilisation; because it is conducted from within the legal system by judges, it aims to challenge doctrinal views strategically and to legitimise the status of unlawfully elected judges, which consequently destabilises the legal system. Because the legal tools to solve the conflict appear to have been exhausted, new judges engage in public discourse to convince citizens that they have a right to sit on the bench. In the first part of this paper, I critically analyse this public discourse in order to explain the framing of the rule of law crisis. The analysis of this discourse is drawn from 106 texts produced by new SC judges between 2017 and 2023. It is argued that although the ‘populist’ group of SC judges is internally differentiated and does not exhibit clear ideological linkage with the PiS party, it strategically produces certain legal narratives in which their appointments and judicial practices at the SC conform to the Constitution and to relevant statutes and, as such, are legitimate in legal terms. The new judges’ narratives are based on four populist dichotomies that distinguish them from old judges (legitimacy–lack of legitimacy, autonomy–political dependence, formal rule of law–legal anarchy and accountability–corporatism). In the second part, the article proceeds to analyse selected case law of the Supreme Court to explore whether and how court-packing makes it more responsive to the legal mobilisation of the conservative Christian organisation Ordo Iuris (OI) and helps the governing party maintain its power. It is argued that the judicial mobilisation inside the packed Supreme Court is mostly of a discursive nature, as there is limited evidence that newly appointed judges side ideologically with the government and right-wing organisations in recent case law.

Drawing primarily from qualitative interviews conducted between 2017 and 2018, this empirical study tells a granular story of how legal actors mobilised during the Lawyers’ Movement in Pakistan (2007–2009) from the perspective of lawyer-leaders who organised, steered and sustained support for the Movement through rapidly shifting political conditions. By underscoring the contribution of lawyer-leaders in empowering judges, the article seeks both to displace uncritical assumptions and arguments about courts as the nucleus of legal mobilisation in Pakistan, and to highlight the crucial role of political parties in the restoration of the judiciary against the backdrop of disintegrating lawyer-judge coalitions. Given Pakistan’s political context of a ‘hybrid regime’, the article reflects on the unsuitability of the ‘legal complex’ theory of ‘political liberalism’ for analysing and understanding the Movement, and locates it instead in the literature on legal mobilisation in authoritarian regimes.

This article puts forward a cohesive narrative to explain the contribution of European social policy to the judicial making of Europe. By making a case for the inclusion of social policy as part of the discourse on the constitutional practice of the Court of Justice of the European Union, together with focusing on a socio-legal deconstruction of four seminal social policy judgments of the Court (Defrenne II, Von Colson, Harz and Francovich), the article undertakes a systematic approach to tracing the contribution of the field, and more specifically of its labour and non-discrimination law strands. To formulate its socio-legal analysis, the article adopts an explanatory framework, which draws on Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and field, the theory of legal mobilisation and Moscovici’s minority social influence, and which is applied to the selected judgments as a case-study. The framework enables the analysis to shed light on the dynamics between stakeholders in the social dimension of the European legal field and to persuasively showcase how social policy case-law, despite its sui generis dynamics, merits to have a place in the conversations surrounding the transformation of Europe.

This paper examines the tension between law's opportunity to deliver social transformation and the normative limitations that shape its effectiveness as a tool of social struggle. The role of law's normative limitations on legal mobilisation strategies, or the effect of entrenched social interests on permissible legal claims, has not been properly conceptualised in legal mobilisation scholarship. In response, this paper presents a conceptual framework that comprehends the opportunity and limitation of legal mobilisation as caught in the tension between the interpretive opportunity to redetermine legal meaning and the normative deficit inherent to this task. By re-engaging with the theoretical underpinnings of legal mobilisation, we will evaluate the potential for certain types of social transformation using law and revisit the rationale for strategic legal action. We will bring together our conceptual treatment of legal mobilisation with a sobering analysis of the Argentinian factory recuperation movement's mobilisation of legal demands. The movement's relative success in confronting the legal system's commitment to private property rights and winning protections for worker co-operatives presents an opportunity to learn about the effective potential of legal strategy and the extent to which it can be used to confront the normative commitments of a legal system.

This paper shows that social inequalities are cumulative and occur at each stage of the dispute pyramid, from the identification of a conflict through to satisfaction with its outcome. Based on a large and original survey on ordinary people's representations of and practices within the legal system in France (N = 2,660), our study finds that an individual's contact, or lack of contact, with a legal intermediary, who may be a legal professional or a non-legal professional, has a very significant impact on the decision to take a case to court. Contact with a legal intermediary also influences the individual's satisfaction with the outcome, but not in the same way for all plaintiffs: income is a more determining factor in satisfaction with the outcome in cases where the judge makes a decision than in cases where a solution is found outside the courtroom.

In his well-researched biography, Mike Chinoy chronicles Kevin Boyle's life and career as a scholar, activist and lawyer, bringing to light his under-appreciated role in the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and the efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict, as well as his contributions to human rights movements in the United Kingdom, Europe and the world. Are You With Me? is an important contribution to the literature on the actors who have shaped the norms, institutions and operations of human rights. In its efforts to shed light on one man, the book offers a fresh alternative to state-centric accounts of the origins of human rights. The book offers a portrait of a social movement actor turned legal scholar who used the law to contest the social inequalities against the minority community to which he belonged and to push for a solution to the underlying political conflict, as well as revelations of the complex power dynamics between human rights lawyers and the social movements they represent. In these respects Are You With Me? also provides valuable insights for socio-legal scholars, especially those focusing on legal mobilisation. At the same time the book could have provided a fuller and more complex biographical account had Chinoy been geographically and linguistically comprehensive in selecting his interviewees. The exclusion of Kurdish lawyers and human rights advocates is noticeable, particularly in light of the inclusion of Boyle's local partners in other contexts, such as South Africa.

Scholars interested in labour in Latin America have traditionally paid little attention to trade unions’ legal mobilisation. However, the increasing number of legal complaints filed by workers with labour ministries and/or the courts in countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile calls for a more serious debate on the role that trade unions play in this process. This article focuses on the Chilean case. Drawing on various sources, it shows that Chilean unions have turned legal complaints into a weapon to gain more rights and curb employers’ power. This process has involved the strongest and most combative unions, and is due to two historical conditions: (1) the obstacles placed in the way of successful resort to more disruptive tactics; (2) the increase in institutional opportunities to report infringements of the law. Overall, the article challenges the current image of the Chilean unions by foregrounding their agency and their achievements over the last decade.

This article shows a novel facet in the complex relation between multiculturalism, the state and the market. Contrary to conventional theories in political science, sociology and anthropology, it shows that it is not just the success, but also the failure of the state and the market to commoditise nature and turn it into property that can actually help to foster ethnic identity. While state-driven market incentives to expand the agricultural frontier in Colombia during the 1960s and 1970s failed, they did help to foster differentiated indigenous identities and organisations, which converged around the revival of long-forgotten nineteenth century indigenous laws and other political opportunities to reclaim lands that had been taken away from them. Moreover, this article also shows that during a period of institutional openness in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the political emergence of indigenous identities became an important component of Colombia’s state-building processes by helping this country to maintain its territorial integrity through a model of delegated indigenous governance.

The global expansion of judicial power and the rise of litigation as a vehicle for social transformation are two conspicuous social phenomena that are subject to intensive research by social scientists and lawyers alike. One of the most hotly debated questions in this regard relates to the potential value of law in general, and litigation in particular, as a strategy for social change. This article examines the question by comparing the struggle for equality in Israel by two groups – women's rights activists and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights activists – between 1970 and 2010. The struggles of women and LGBT people for equality have many shared characteristics, since both challenge the traditional conservative patriarchal social model. In Israeli society, moreover, both LGBT rights activists and women's equality activists faced the same political rivals: the powerful macho-type socio-political mentality, rooted in the central status of the military in Israeli society, and the strong hold of Jewish ultra-orthodox parties in the political system. The strategies that the two groups adopted to overcome these obstacles, however, were markedly different. While women's groups adopted an elitist strategy of struggle that concentrated on legal measures, LGBT rights groups adopted a variety of strategies that emphasised grassroots political tactics. The article examines the success of each group in achieving its political objectives by using cross-country comparative indexes of LGBT and women's rights. I argue that the comparison between the two groups points to the relative weaknesses of legal and litigation-centred strategies as vehicles for social transformation.