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Legal mobilization and branches of law: Contesting racialized policing in French courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Magda Boutros
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Abstract

When activists use the law to promote social change, how does the branch of law (criminal law, civil law, etc.) matter for movement outcomes? To examine this question, the article builds on legal mobilization scholarship, and on a qualitative study comparing three litigation strategies to contest racialized policing in France: mobilizing criminal law to hold officers accountable for police killings, mobilizing civil law to sue the state for racial profiling, and combining criminal and civil law to contest racialized police harassment. The findings suggest that three characteristics of legal branches matter for legal mobilization: (i) the branch's dominant paradigm (e.g., punitive vs. compensatory) determines how the problem gets framed and which actors are blamed for it; (ii) the legal provisions of each branch shape which aspects of the problem get highlighted, and which are obscured; (iii) the procedural and evidentiary rules determine the extent to which activists and victims can intervene in the fact-finding process and thus how much they can influence the strength of their claims in court. When they mobilize the law, social change actors strategize around the opportunities and constraints of various branches of law, to try influencing judicial decisions and the media coverage of cases.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , December 2022 , pp. 623 - 645
Copyright
© 2022 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

How to cite this article: Boutros, Magda. 2022. “Legal Mobilization and Branches of Law: Contesting Racialized Policing in French Courts.” Law & Society Review 56(4): 623–645. https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12628

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