ABSTRACT
“Legal mobilization,” as an area of study within law and society most often focuses upon the way activists make use of the law to stake out legal claims, to enable social movement mobilization, and to create new understandings of law that will advance the views of activists concerning what is right and just. In these studies the analysis begins, most often, with the moment individuals become aware of an injustice they have suffered ( Felstiner et al. 1980–1981). As Michael McCann (2008) points out, legal mobilization tends to focus on the actions of nonofficial legal actors in an analytical move that is also sometimes referred to as “decentering” the courts (see also McCann 1994). Yet the “bottom-up jurisprudence” used in this research often decenters all government institutions to such an extent that it is hard to capture the dynamic relationships between the institutions and the actors responding to them. And once decentered, the role of institutional power becomes difficult to analyze.
