This article undertakes a systematic analysis of environmental litigation at the Court of Justice of the European Union, focusing primarily on preliminary reference procedures initiated by civil society actors. It does so in order to provide a basis for future research that goes beyond individual case studies. Central take-aways are strong geographical disparities in cases brought by individuals and environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs), with many cases from Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands and very few cases from Spain, Greece and Portugal. Cases brought by individuals are equally numerous as cases brought by ENGOs, suggesting that ENGOs are not the only beneficiaries of the procedural innovations precipitated by the Aarhus Convention. Finally, companies are the most frequent litigants in environmental cases. Not all such cases challenge environmental obligations, but the significant number of cases that do, even where they are directed at individual decisions rather than policies, pose significant questions about the cumulative effects of such litigation.

Scholars have examined how legal mobilization unifies or divides social movement organizations, largely treating it as a singular process. Yet, social movement organizations united in litigation may diverge in legislative reform. Drawing on the case of South Korea’s statutory rape law, I show how organizational identities rooted in distinct ideological orientations and commitments to different victim populations remained implicit during collaborative litigation. When a legislative opening emerged from changing political opportunities, some organizations advanced age-based protections while others resisted, interpreting age-raising as undermining transformative reforms of rape law toward a consent-based definition of rape. The findings demonstrate that legal institutions mediate how organizational identity shapes responses to political opportunities: litigation enables bracketing differences, while legislation exposes divergent interpretations. This paper contributes to an understanding of how legal mobilization and movement factions are structured and operate.

This article examines the first attempts of the transnational gay rights movement to frame its demands in the vocabulary of international human rights law (IHRL). Based on archival research and oral history interviews, the article narrates how the International Gay Association (IGA) advocated for recognition within broader IHRL civil society between the late 1970s and early 1990s. The article analyses the almost two-decades-long campaign to convince Amnesty International that gay rights were an IHRL issue. The lobby directed at Amnesty serves to demonstrate a threefold argument: (i) queer transnational activism’s history significantly overlaps with the history of IHRL; (ii) the resort to IHRL by queer activists was both purposeful and accidental. While it ultimately proved decisive in positioning LGBTI+ struggles within mainstream legal debates, it also relied on a contingent set of historical conditions and strategic choices; (iii) queer demands were not ‘naturally’ linked to IHRL, and it took a lengthy process of advocacy for the scope of IHRL to finally open itself to queer claims.

This review essay articulates methodological insights gleaned from Whitney Taylor’s The Social Constitution: Embedding Social Rights Through Legal Mobilization (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Through an analysis of how Taylor used interview and comparative methods, the essay addresses the opportunities and challenges of drawing on interview data to make sense of past events. It also explores the use of comparative methods, both comparing one country to another and comparing different regions in one country.

This study examines how Chinese university students’ legal consciousness is shaped by the tension between rights empowerment and repressive control in the context of anti-sexual harassment mobilization. Drawing on relational legal consciousness scholarship and extending work on relational repression, I argue that the legal dualism of the authoritarian state, which promotes rights through legislation while suppressing their assertion through stability maintenance, reaches students through their relational networks. Based on in-depth interviews with forty-eight students and seventeen institutional actors, supplemented by participant observation, this study identifies “concern for rights” and “concern for oppression” as two competing forces generated and transmitted through relationships. Contrasting these two forces, I propose a two-dimensional framework that maps four states of legal consciousness. Among them, “watchful awakening,” where students are fully aware of rights violations yet strategically constrained by oppression, emerges as predominant. The study traces how relational variables, including student positionality, institutional dependency, and university hierarchy, shift the relative weight of these concerns and propel students between different states. This framework reveals how the state’s contradictory signals are reproduced at the individual level through the very relationships that individuals depend on for support, solidarity, and survival.

This article identifies and analyzes a select body of climate litigation, framing such litigation as a decolonial approach to legal mobilization. Drawing on 58 cases filed between 2003 and 2023, we examine how certain climate lawsuits – spanning diverse jurisdictions, legal claims, and forums – articulate political projects grounded in historical struggles against colonialism, racial capitalism, and extractivism. Instead of adopting conventional typologies based on rights, torts or procedural elements, we propose a political lens attentive to the subaltern voices, contexts, and narratives that animate these cases. We identify commonalities across this litigation: racialized plaintiffs, three contexts of decolonial struggle (settler colonies, metropoles/(post)colonies, and global peripheries), and four distinctive types of decolonial claim. While these cases remain partially entangled with liberal legal frameworks, they nonetheless contest dominant climate governance paradigms and advance emancipatory visions of justice. We argue that these cases represent a tactical, albeit imperfect, intervention in the struggle for decolonial climate justice.

While prior research has focused on the role of cause lawyers in legal and social reforms within authoritarian regimes, the everyday practices of non-cause lawyers handling controversial cases remain unexplored. Drawing on 60 interviews with family lawyers and divorced women in Iran, this study directs attention to the everyday practices of ordinary lawyers, with a focus on divorce cases initiated by women, which are among the most challenging cases in Iran’s family courts. The study introduces a typology to distinguish between lawyers who are outcome-oriented and those who are transformative-oriented. I argue that lawyers’ perceptions of professional responsibility and their understandings of what counts as “meaningful reform” in a judiciary that is unreceptive to women’s rights influence how they pursue legal mobilization against codified gender inequality within an authoritarian system. This study concludes by suggesting that future research should examine how lawyers’ interpersonal interactions, as well as their educational and professional training, shape their approaches to challenging inequality and discrimination.

This article asks how legalism emerges in policy fields long governed by informal coordination and weak legal enforcement, focusing on Japan’s consumer finance regime. It develops the concept of “processual legalism,” in which legalism is understood not as an all-or-nothing regime type but the cumulative result of recurrent interactions between courts, bureaucracies, legislators, and cause lawyers. The article identifies three core mechanisms: institutional friction, generated by regulatory ambiguity and uneven enforcement; normative reframing, through which lawyers transform moralised, individualised grievances into structural injustices; and consensus realignment, as judicially articulated norms are integrated into administrative and legislative reforms. Together, these mechanisms illuminate legalism as a contingent process rather than a structural condition. While legalism is episodic in its activation, the institutional changes it generates are incremental and consensus-dependent, revealing important varieties of legalism within coordinated market economies.

Sociolegal research has long found that most people “lump” their problems rather than pursue legal remedies. This study examines how social media transforms legal consciousness and mobilization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 100 families who experienced the same birth injury, and 37 legal and medical professionals, we analyze how online communities shape perceptions of medical injury, blame attribution, and legal action. We find that parents often experience profound guilt, believing they are responsible for their child’s injury. However, participation in online support groups reframes their understanding of the injury, shifting their guilt toward medical providers and fostering legal claims. Our findings show that social media serves as a new “structuring structure,” shaping legal consciousness across geographic and social class boundaries. Social media serves as a powerful force in shaping parents’ perceptions of their child’s injuries as legally actionable, challenging existing assumptions about why people do or do not pursue legal action. By examining how online communities facilitate the transformation from guilt to blame and encourage legal mobilization, this study contributes to broader sociolegal debates about the role of digital technologies in shaping contemporary legal consciousness.

Cet article explore les effets ambivalents des mobilisations juridiques autochtones, dans un contexte de faible État de droit, à partir d’une étude de cas approfondie de la communauté Xákmok Kásek au Paraguay. Malgré une victoire devant la Cour interaméricaine des droits de l’Homme, les résultats matériels restent limités. Toutefois, le recours au droit joue un rôle important en légitimant les luttes et en structurant les actions collectives. L’analyse repose sur un travail de terrain mené à Asunción et dans le Chaco en 2022, incluant quarante-six entretiens, l’étude de documents juridiques et l’accès aux archives d’ONG. Théoriquement, l’article mobilise les travaux sur les mobilisations juridiques dans les régimes hybrides et autoritaires. Il montre que le droit, bien qu’imparfait, peut renforcer la visibilité et la légitimité des revendications. Cette contribution éclaire les usages stratégiques du droit dans des contextes répressifs et invite à reconsidérer ses effets au-delà des victoires formelles.

What does conducting law and society scholarship have anything to do with wilting blooms? In this essay, Lynette J. Chua makes the connection between the two through her reminder to law and society scholars to study the taken-for-granted, an intellectual project that has become all the more urgent as politicians and activists contest concepts such as citizenship, gender, territories, religion and rights. She also calls upon fellow law and society scholars to be humble – for the significance and impact of our research, like flowers, could come and go with the seasons.