Two spinning wheels: Studying law and social movements

• Pages: 1-16
• Date: 22 February 2011
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-4337(2011)0000054004
• Published date: 22 February 2011
• Author: Scott Barclay,Lynn C. Jones,Anna-Maria Marshall

TWO SPINNING WHEELS:

STUDYING LAW AND

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Scott Barclay, Lynn C. Jones and

Anna-Maria Marshall

ABSTRACT

Those interested in studying the relationship between law and social

movements have a wide variety of theoretical and empirical research to

draw on, from both social movement theory and legal studies. Yet these

disparate studies of law and social movements rarely engage with each

other. In this chapter, we review current developments in research on law

and social movements and summarize the chapters in this special issue.

These chapters offer insight into the multivalent nature of law for social

movements, the factors shaping movements’ strategic engagements with

the legal system, the relationship between law and identity for social

movement activists, and the complex role that cause lawyers play in social

movement processes and dynamics.

Special Issue: Social Movements/Legal Possibilities

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 54, 1–16

Copyright r2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-4337(2011)0000054004

1

SYNTHESIZING LAW AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

For nearly two generations, scholars haveaddressed the role that social move-

ments play in reforming the law. These studies have documented social move-

ment campaigns to mobilize collective s ocial, political, and economic power to

challenge laws that previously marginalized them or their allies. In these long

and often arduous struggles, laws (and the popular meaning of t hose laws)

were transformed. For nearly as long, legal studies scholars have emphasized

the role that law plays in spawning the initial claims of inequality or injustice,

in building movements, and in framing the issues to be challenged. Through

the years, these two bodies of research have revealed the central tensions

at the heart of the relationship between law and social movements: social

movements use the lawin their emancipatory struggles to challenge oppressive

conditions that are, in turn, so often sustained by legal rules and institutions.

Yet, through all the years of research on similar topics, social movement

scholars and socio-legal scholars were largely talking past each other. For

all their focus on the complex and contingent nature of social movement

formation and its development over time, social movement scholars treated

law as a largely fixed feature of this system. Law so often embodied

the oppression that shaped the core experiences of marginalized groups.

As such, it existed primarily as a foil against which social movements, and

the character of the activists who populated them, were built (Marx &

McAdam, 1993; McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001). And, for all their focus

on the complex and contingent nature of law, socio-legal scholars often

treated social movement goals as largely pre-determined by the circum-

stances that occasioned their initial development and unchanging over

time. Similarly, social movements were presumed to be monolithic in their

outlook; lacking in their ability to learn in all but the most disastrous

of circumstances (Cain, 2001; Mezey, 2007; Mucciaroni, 2008). There

were notable exceptions to these perspectives (Olson, 1984, McCann, 1994,

Silverstein, 1996, Hull, 2006), but these two intellectual traditions largely

existed as two wheels spinning away on their own separate paths.

The chapters in this symposium do more than slow each of these separate

wheels down to examine their different components. They also focus on

the mechanisms that operate to make each of the wheels work together

in a surprising form of dependency, if not harmony, with the other.

To understand law and social movements requires recognizing that these

two apparently disparate elements – law and social movements – are actively

engaged in an ongoing exchange in which neither element is ever fully free

of the influences of the other.

SCOTT BARCLAY ET AL.2