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Political Claims, Legal Derailment, and the Context of Disputes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Penelope Canan ,
Gloria Satterfield ,
Laurie Larson  and
Martin Kretzmann
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Abstract

This article is about claims manipulation and the influence of context on the careers and outcomes of disputes. We explore eleven cases in which civil tort action was used when citizen opponents petitioned the government (lawsuits called SLAPPs or “strategic lawsuits against public participation”). Rather than being totally contingent on interactional and situational factors, these disputes followed two general trajectories of transformation, depending on whether they arose from an “internal” or “external” setting. Disputes initially tied to a broad cultural or political claims base were transformed into more narrow and concrete claims. Yet the original political claims of the lawsuit targets were less likely derailed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , 1990 , pp. 923 - 952
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meetings of the Law and Society Association, Madison, Wis., June 1989. This research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation's Law and Social Sciences Program under Grant No. SES-8714495. For a complete list of participants and news coverage consulted for the cases discussed here, contact the Political Litigation Project, University of Denver, Department of Sociology, Denver, CO 80208.

We would like to thank Nancy Reichman, Reid T. Reynolds, Neal Milner, Shari Seidman Diamond, and the anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and Karen Caldwell and Patricia Wellinger for their research assistance.

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