Lawyers and Embedded Legal Activity in the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

We introduce the concept of embedded legal activity to capture the ways in which lawyers and legal organizations can become intertwined in the ongoing activities of social movements. Embedded legal activity is characterized by diverse issues and venues and comprises legal activities that help support movement infrastructure, close coordination between movement lawyers and other activists, and responsiveness to constituent needs. Investigating a comprehensive data set on legal activity during the southern civil rights movement, we identify forms of legal activity beyond the typical focus of legal mobilization, including defense for movement participants charged with misdemeanors and other crimes, movement assistance on organization‐level legal matters, and general legal aid to movement constituents. These were by far the more common types of legal activity and emerged from the embeddedness of lawyers in a mass movement. We argue that embedded legal activity is likely where movements prioritize grassroots leadership and community organizing and face significant countermobilization, hostile legal and political opportunity structures, and substantial social and economic inequality.

Beyond litigation: Policy work within cause lawyering organizations

“…However, another vein of scholarship on LOS demonstrates that some cause lawyering activity is not always done in the presence of such structures (Tarn, 2010; Vanhala, 2018). Sometimes cause lawyers have to react to defend clients and movement interests, including against hostile regimes (Andrews & Jowers, 2018; Stone, 2012; van der Vet, 2018). Building on this theme, this project suggests that if organizations are able to engage in both political and legal opportunity structures, and even perhaps build their own opportunities, as Vanhala (2012) argued with regard to LOS, some cause lawyers might have greater autonomy than we have previously understood.…”

Turning on the lights? Publicity and defensive legal mobilization in protest-related trials in Russia

“…The litigation‐centered understanding of legal mobilization, first developed in US‐based scholarship, is deeply rooted in the mechanics of the common law system, relying on legal precedents and landmark decisions of appellate courts. However, as Andrews and Jowers (2018, p. 13) rightly argue in their study of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, “movements are often drawn into the courtroom or forced to engage in some sort of legal activity by countermovements.” While they suggest resolving this problem by differentiating between “conventional legal mobilization” and “embedded legal activity” within a social movement (Andrews & Jowers, 2018, p. 11), I argue that we should not simply forfeit the concept of legal mobilization per se. It is not a coincidence that several researchers working on repressive contexts refer to this concept when they deal with legal defense rather than litigation, that is, when lawyers do not engage in strategic litigation or file lawsuits but come to assist those charged with a crime or infraction.…”

Cause Lawyering and Movement Tactics: Disability Rights Movements in South Korea and Japan

“…Just as lawyers are trained to frame grievances in legal categories associated with potential remedies, so local norm entrepreneurs connect local issues with global norms and “vernacularize” norms to facilitate their diffusion and adoption (Merry , 39). Norm entrepreneurs often bring insights from having helped craft the norm through transnational activism; lawyers may have experience leveraging the law and drafting bills since their activities frequently extend beyond the courtroom (Epp ; Andrews and Jowers ). Finally, like cause lawyers, norm entrepreneurs broker reform coalitions by publicizing noncompliance through “information politics” (Keck and Sikkink ) or legal mobilization (McCann ).…”