This chapter, the result of extensive fieldwork primarily focusing on Shanghai and Wuhan, where the most significant lockdowns occurred, uncovers the unexamined role of Chinese homeowners and their associations in monitoring and resisting the party-state’s encroachments on individual rights during the COVID pandemic, a phenomenon I term “cooperating to resist.” This chapter demonstrates that the cooperation of Chinese homeowners, which was indispensable to the party-state’s ability to maintain its pandemic control measures, brought them the power to mobilize, resist, and contribute to an abrupt ending of China’s lockdown policy which the party-state’s top leadership had attached its legitimacy to.

Chapter 9 extends the argument of this book to the case of the 1996 South African Constitution, demonstrating the usefulness of examining the contours and limits of constitutional embeddedness beyond the Colombian context. The South African case is one of partial constitutional embedding, where legal embedding significantly outpaced social embedding. This comparative examination probes different ways in which constitutional embedding can occur in practice, and it helps to show how constitutional embedding is not a necessary or inevitable phenomenon.

Chapter 2 introduces the idea of “constitutional embedding” and describes how legal mobilization can put into motion processes that result in the embedding of social constitutionalism. Constitutional embedding occurs along two dimensions: social and legal. Where social and legal embedding reinforce one another, constitutional embedding will be particularly robust. Where they do not, constitutional embedding will be vulnerable to challenges related to the scope of the law, concerns of powerful actors, and the workload judges must navigate. Each type of challenge can derail both social and legal embeddedness, and, as a result, limit the potential for social constitutionalism to translate into gains in real access to social welfare goods. Legal mobilization can catalyze constitutional embedding, as it facilitates the social construction of legal grievances and the development of judicial receptivity to particular kind of claims, in the process shaping views about the law.

The Introduction sets out the core puzzle of the book, its central question and argument, and the research setting. It begins with a brief story about a Vietnamese female worker’s struggle to make ends meet, and her attempt to withdraw her pension early to meet pressing family demands. The anecdote raises a striking issue about the paradoxical nature of citizens’ use of the law, or resistance to it, in their daily life: While their behaviour represents an attempt to overcome certain conditions of uncertainty and instability in work and life, their action ironically puts them in another challenging, precarious situation. This chapter introduces the notion of precarity and outlines key elements of the conceptual framework that shed light on the mutual relationship between precarity and law as developed from the author's ethnographic observations of Vietnamese low-income workers and residents.

This chapter critically engages with relevant legal consciousness literature and develops the conceptual framework of the book. It examines three accounts of law in everyday life – hegemony, alienation, and empowerment – and demonstrates their limitations in explaining the mixed, paradoxical effects of law observed through the experiences of interviewed workers and residents in Vietnam. The ethnographic approach adopted in this research foregrounds the complex nature of individuals’ life circumstances and their decision-making. The concept of precarity as applied in this book consists of three main components: Precarity as a phenomenon and result of the broader neoliberal economic structure, precarity as multifaceted and variegated individual experiences, and precarity as a ground of resistance. This chapter develops a three-pronged process that underpins the mutually reinforcing relationship between precarity and law, and identifies some of the factors that make a socialist country like Vietnam a suitable setting to explore such a relationship.

This chapter introduces the theoretical framework of state-building as lawfare. The chapter starts by outlining the building blocks of peripheral state-building: legal pluralism, nested sovereignty, gender cleavage, and armed conflict. Legal pluralism is an issue of fragmented social control. State–society struggles for social control are complicated because both the state and society are internally divided. The concept of nested sovereignty captures how the state is divided in imperial and federal settings. The central societal cleavage of state-building lawfare is gender. Both political and societal cleavages that drive state-building lawfare in the periphery are actualized and intensified by armed conflict. Building on this foundation, the chapter then theorizes state-building lawfare from above. In particular, it outlines when and why central and peripheral authorities promote non-state legal systems, as well as how conflict changes the political rationale of promoting legal pluralism. After that, the chapter interrogates state-building lawfare from below – focusing on individual choices between state and non-state legal systems. It also speculates about how conflict transforms the driving forces behind these choices – in identities and social norms – as well as resources, interests, and hierarchies, with a special focus on gender relations.

This chapter explores the legacies of the wartime disruption of gender hierarchies. It shows that after the Second War a sizable share of Chechen women began using the Russian state legal system, which formally acknowledges gender equality. The chapter suggests that the disruption of gender hierarchies can be attributed to several interrelated mechanisms. The most significant cultural change was that the conflict forced women to enter the public sphere. Women became representatives of their families and communities. At the same time, conflict gave rise to militarized masculinity and neo-traditionalism among Chechen men. This divergence was multiplied by changes in bargaining power within families due to transformations of gender positions in the labor market: many women became their families’ breadwinners. Furthermore, the effect of the disruption of gender hierarchies was exacerbated by the process of community disintegration, which diminished the ability of the extended family to apply pressure against women who used state courts. In addition, after the war, many of the NGOs refocused on gender problems and served as support structures for women’s legal mobilization. The last part of the chapter shows that women’s legal mobilization in Chechnya faced strong backlash from the Chechen regional government.

Drawing upon a study of the labor movement’s challenge to inequality in Los Angeles from 1992 to 2008, this chapter presents a critical analysis of the city as a site of solidarity. It shows how, to build local labor law, the labor movement must promote solidarity not just among workers but among different progressive movements, which become interlinked around campaigns to reshape low-wage work, while also promoting related goals: including immigrant inclusion, expanding affordable housing, and promoting environmental justice. As such, the chapter is fundamentally about the role of solidarity in efforts to build decentralized power in a political context where there is an absence of political opportunities for moving labor policy, specifically, and progressive social policy more generally at the national level. Building decentralized power as a way to rebuild labor law, this chapter suggests, requires conceptualizing solidarity as a local, city-wide project, with two related components: one is inter-movement solidarity, which is solidarity between labor and allied movements; and the other is intra-movement solidarity, which is solidarity among workers fighting for better lives. The chapter argues that, while both visions of solidarity are necessary to build local labor reform, there are tensions between the two that must always be managed.

This chapter presents the results of a comprehensive study of the universe of rights-based climate cases filed in domestic courts and in regional and international judicial and quasi-judicial bodies between 2015 and 2021. Part I offers an overview of human rights-based climate change (HRCC) litigation. Part II analyzes the legal rules and principles emerging from HRCC lawsuits and court decisions around the world. Part III offers conclusions about the potential and limitations of HRCC litigation in advancing climate action.The chapter argues that the regulatory logic and the strategy of HRCC litigation should be examined at the intersection of international and domestic governance. Litigants have predominantly followed a two-pronged strategy. They have (1) asked courts to take the goals of the climate regime (as set out in the Paris Agreement and IPCC reports) as benchmarks to assess governments’ policies and (2) invoked the norms and enforcement mechanisms of human rights to hold governments accountable for such goals. In the face of governments’ reluctance in taking the urgent measures that are needed to address the climate emergency, HRCC litigation can be fruitfully viewed as a bottom-up mechanism that provides domestic traction for the international legal and scientific consensus on climate action.

This chapter turns from the legal to the sociolegal to offer a different lens through which to consider the phenomenon of climate change litigation. By drawing on theoretical approaches in the study of legal mobilization, this chapter sheds light on some of the social and political dynamics of climate change litigation. I suggest that situating climate change litigation in its social and political context is useful in gaining a more holistic understanding of what is at stake when individuals and groups turn to the courts as part of their efforts to address the climate crisis. Drawing on the contributions to this volume, this chapter (1) shows how legal mobilization theory can be helpful to practitioners and scholars interested in understanding, explaining, and assessing climate change litigation in practice, and (2) highlights some of the ways in which studying climate change litigation can shape our conceptual and empirical understandings of processes of legal mobilization more generally.

Peru is often cited as an example of the internationalization of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) norms through supra-national litigation. Yet the impact to petitioners and other similarly situated women in Peruvian society has fallen far short of expectations. This chapter analyzes the actors behind progressive litigation in Peru, as well as their strategies and those of anti-abortion advocates. It shows that the professionalization, specialization, and detachment from grassroots movements of Peruvian feminist NGOs limit their capacity to build a broader network of political support and thus leverage the opportunities presented by successful litigation. By contrast, anti-abortion organizations are closely connected to grassroots organizations and have developed links to political organizations that allow them to deploy different strategies to stall efforts at expanding the right to abortion.

If the judicial construction of Europe was not catalyzed by innately activist judges, who were the pioneers of change? Focusing on the 1960s-early 1980s, Chapter 5 introduces the first Euro-lawyers: A vanguard of independent-minded WWII survivors who sought to unite Europe via bottom-up lawyering. Less institutionally constrained than judges, they nonetheless had to erode ubiquitous knowledge deficits and habits embodied by courts and clients. To this end, they cultivated local litigants and disputes exposing national barriers to European integration; constructed test cases to introduce local judges to European rules they hardly knew; cajoled their interlocutors to solicit the ECJ by ghostwriting their referrals; and thus generated opportunities for the ECJ to render pathbreaking judgments. The chapter combines oral history interviews, materials from the ECJ and lawyers’ personal archives, secondary historiographies and newspaper records, and geocoded data of the first referrals to the ECJ. The chapter speaks to readers seeking a new perspective on the origins of European integration, the creativity and mischievousness of strategic litigation, how lawyers cultivate the rights-consciousness of litigants and the activism of judges, and how individuals promote novel practices that cut against imagined possibilities.