Legal Mobilization in the Global Age: Expanding the Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Analysis

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This research investigates the cost and consequences of legal mobilization. Legal mobilization is the effort to advance legal rights claims and use litigation in campaigns for social change. Using archival materials, private papers, and legal records, the research team will analyze the activities of a small union of Filipino American cannery workers over the course of seventy years that eventually culminated in the landmark US Supreme Court ruling in Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio (1989). By examining how three generations of workers used litigation in struggles for both racial and economic justice as well as integrated these US campaigns with political and social struggles in the Philippines, the findings will theoretically advance existing legal mobilization models by situating litigation as a multi-stage, incremental, and potentially transformative set of processes in a globalized world.Much recent scholarship has argued that the narrow anti-discrimination principles that emerged through civil rights litigation of the 1950s divided movements for civil rights and economic justice. The current research challenges this theory. As such, the research refines the current understandings of the role of law in movements for labor and civil rights in the United States.