Mobilization of the law or legal mobilization refers to the process, formal or informal, deliberate or unintentional, often initiated by individuals and parties to put the law into action by making it work for them. Black, of course, defined it as “the process by which a legal system acquires its cases” (cited by Neubauer and Meinhold 2013, p. 195), but the terseness of this definition fails to completely cover the complexity of the process. The concept of legal mobilization implies that the law is something passive and, therefore, needs to be pushed or stirred to actually work. When you think about it, this is quite true. If no one invokes the law or no one files an action in court to seek redress or to assert his right, the law is just merely a code, a text or a set of norms that are lifeless and static. But when a party goes to court to assert his right over the government or another person, the courts, which are merely standing on the sidelines, get into action to breathe life and meaning to the law.
Political scientists are interested in the concept of legal mobilization because it is a means of creating institutional changes, especially in the civil rights movement. In the US, which had a long history of slavery and segregation, institutional changes were wrought because people at various point in time demanded their rights and went to court. Had no one done this, the law would have been just one meaningless set of rules. This was proven with the case of Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), when members of the African-American community went to court as legal representatives of their minor children to protest the segregation of black children from whites in school buses and other areas in schools. The Warren Court then struck down segregation as a violation of the 4th Amendment’s equal protection clause (Hadden and Brophy pp. 115-116). The Brown case and similar cases that challenge the status quo are particularly significant in the legal mobilization movement. These policy litigation cases are significant because they do not only affect the parties, but often a broader sector of society (Neubauer and Meinhold 2013, p. 202).
References
Hadden, S. and Brophy, A. (2013). A Companion to American Legal History. John Wiley & Sons.
Neubuer, D. and Meinhold, S. (2013). Judicial Process: Law, Courts and Politics in the United States. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage.
