"Public Interest Litigation in a Neoliberal Age: Law, Media, and the Politics of Responsibility"

关于自由派公益律师的法律的动员运动的学术研究尚未分析或评估诉讼如何实现其宣传问题和塑造公众对这些问题的理解的主要目标。本研究调查如何增加企业和政府责任的实质性索赔和通过公益诉讼活动推进这些索赔的主要倡导者的信誉，在我们的大众媒介的政治文化的建设和评估。 该项目通过实证追踪公共利益集团关于硅胶乳房植入物、快餐、肥胖和枪支等四个领域健康危害的索赔和诉讼来探索这些问题。PI将使用传统的框架分析来跟踪每个政策领域的法律的动员，从争议者声明或推断的目标，到法律的争议的新闻报道和争议引起的更广泛的问题，再到关注的利益集团、官方政策制定者和大众的回应。 这将通过对公开声明的对手目标的定性内容分析来实现;对新闻杂志、报纸和通讯社的政策问题抽样报道的大型数据集（2500篇文章）进行定量分析;对团体领导人和诉讼律师、记者和编辑以及官方决策者进行采访;对公众舆论和诉讼对传统政策影响的可用数据进行分析。 研究结果将发表在大学出版社的书籍、学术文章、流行新闻杂志文章和公共网站上。更广泛的影响将包括为研究生和本科生提供重要的研究培训经验，以及产生有关健康风险的当前政治的重要见解，这些风险可能会引起活动家，政策精英和公民的极大兴趣。

Scholarship regarding legal mobilization campaigns by liberal public interest lawyers has yet to analyze or to assess how well litigation achieves its primary goals of publicizing issues and shaping public understandings of those issues. This research investigates how both the substantive claims for increased corporate and governmental responsibility and the credibility of key advocates advancing these claims through public interest litigation campaigns are constructed and assessed in our mass-mediated political culture. The project explores these questions by empirically tracing public interest groups' claims and litigation regarding health hazards related to four areas: silicone breast implants, fast food, obesity, and guns. The PIs will use conventional framing analysis to follow legal mobilization in each policy area from disputants' stated or inferred objectives through news coverage of legal disputes and the broader issues that disputes raise to responses from attentive interest groups, official policy makers, and mass audiences. This will be accomplished through qualitative content analyses of publicly stated goals of adversaries; quantitative analysis of a large data set (2500 articles) sampling coverage of the policy issues in newsmagazines, newspapers, and wire services; interviews with group leaders and litigators, reporters and editors, and official policymakers; and analyses of available data on public opinion and conventional policy impacts of litigation. Findings will be published in a university press book, scholarly articles, popular news magazine articles, and a public website. Broader impacts will include significant research training experiences for graduate and undergraduate students as well as generation of important insights about current politics regarding health risks that are likely to be of great interest to issue activists, policy elites, and citizens generally.