Legal Mobilization on the Terrain of the State: Creating a Field of Immigrant Rights Lawyering in France and the United States

Abstract

Scholarship on law and social movements has focused attention primarily on the United States, and secondarily on countries that share the Anglo‐American legal tradition. The politics of law and social movements in other national legal contexts remains underexamined. The analysis in this article contrasts legal mobilizations for immigrant rights in France and the United States, and explores the relations between national fields of power and legal practices. I trace the institutionalization of immigrant rights legal organizations in each country and argue that the divergent organizational forms and litigation strategies adopted by professionalized movement organizations reflect the dynamics of the nationally distinct fields of power relations within which law reform has been conducted. My analysis links the material and symbolic resources available to law reformers to the relative authority of private and public juridical actors in each state.

From a Spouse to a Citizen: The Gendered and Sexualized Path to Citizenship for Marriage Migrants in South Korea

“…In the past few decades, however, scholars have noted the growing role of the courts in protecting the rights of migrants (see, e.g., Joppke , ; Kawar ; Martin ; Soennecken ; Schuck ; Schuck and Wang ). According to this view, courts and nonelected judges are insulated from the public pressures of anti‐immigrant sentiment and have increasingly overruled decisions made by re‐election‐seeking legislators and restriction‐minded state executives.…”

Legal Mobilization within the Bureaucracy: Disability Rights and the Implementation of Antidiscrimination Law in Sweden

“…Given that legal mobilization policy remains largely underexamined in contexts outside of the United States and common law countries (Kawar ), the analysis of the Swedish case raises two important questions for further research on legal mobilization. First, from the mesolevel perspective, it invites us to give more attention to the state, its relationship with social movements, and its role in legal mobilization in nonpluralist countries.…”

Legal Mobilization and Juridification: Migration as a Central Case

“…Constitutional reform of the courts in Britain, one of the important developments of British politics after the Thatcher era, came in part from practitioners' interests in managing the growing number of immigration cases in the general jurisdiction courts (Sterett 1997). Immigration politics and the claims one could make in court allowed lawyers to take on the professional project of making the field of immigration law in both France and the United States (Kawar 2011(Kawar , 2014(Kawar , 2015.…”

“…The cases before final courts of appeal that articulate rights echo through groups of lawyers, advocacy organizations, and government officials, leading to a conclusion about the judicialization of politics. Responsibility for that judicialization is often all ascribed to judges, although other officials have made decisions about how to manage claims (Kawar 2014(Kawar , 2015 and even though interest organizations support claims (Epp 1998). Attributing decisions to the liberal democratic commitments of judges does not account for the routes cases take and the virtues that claimants who mean to delay deportation find in the process.…”