What do clients value in legal representation? Based on 65 in-depth interviews with Anishinaabek litigants and their relatives, this study explores how clients construct attorney-client relationships, value representation and experience justice. Drawing from the sociolegal literature on access to justice, attorney-client relationships, and legal services delivery, this article extends understandings of how relationship dynamics inform client evaluations of legal representation and their justice experiences. Caretaking, or a reciprocal relationship with a lawyer based on human connection, respect and a mutual sense of being in a difficult situation together, emerges as a crucial way Anishinaabek value lawyers that help them navigate confusing legal processes during difficult times in their lives. These findings question the promises of procedural justice by illuminating how clients decouple their experiences with lawyers from their views of the justice system. They also contribute to timely debates about the importance of legal representation and access to justice in marginalized communities.
This paper engages with the literature on the right against rights and autocratic legalism to examine the context and tactics of conservative legal mobilization against rights in North Africa. Drawing on legal case studies, interviews, and court observations in Egypt and Tunisia, I argue that in contexts of illiberal legality, law and rights discourses become the legitimizing tools of conservative mobilizations. The case studies presented reveal three primary tactics used by conservative legal actors in Egypt and Tunisia in their assault on gender and sexuality rights. The first, rights selectivism, is a tactic of referencing a set of rights to legitimize the oppression of other rights. Second, by deploying repressive legalism, conservative legal actors resort to tangential legal codes to punish minorities and those advocating for minority rights. Third, through appeals to majoritarianism, democracy, and anticolonial work are used to trump minority rights. This study contributes to emerging sociolegal scholarship on the right against rights and illiberal legality by illustrating how rights and legality are weaponized to advance antirights, antigender, and antiminority agendas.
Abstract 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.
Abstract Socio-legal scholarship increasingly conceptualizes legal consciousness as relational, yet research has focused primarily on how individuals’ understandings of law are shaped through interpersonal interactions and social relationships. Less attention has been paid to how broader cultural beliefs circulating within political-economic systems shape whether – and how – individuals invoke or refrain from invoking law when interpreting everyday experiences. We extend relational legal consciousness scholarship by examining how macro-level cultural beliefs structure meaning-making about digital data privacy in the United States. We analyze data from a survey experiment in which 600 respondents evaluated vignettes describing secondary uses of personal data by government and private corporations for different motives. Quantitative analyses of 2,555 vignette evaluations show that perceived acceptability varies systematically by both actor and motive. Interpretive analysis of open-ended responses reveals that participants draw on multiple cultural beliefs – including everyday expectations of legality, market logics, institutional trust, and narratives of technological inevitability – when evaluating these practices. By showing how cultural beliefs related and unrelated to law and legality work together to shape everyday interpretations of privacy encroachments, we extend relational legal consciousness scholarship beyond interpersonal relationships to encompass the broader cultural environment in which legal meaning-making occurs. We further demonstrate that this relational dynamic has political-economic consequences: a diverse range of cultural beliefs – not only narratives of commodification and technological inevitability – can normalize, conditionally legitimate, or challenge the data practices associated with informational capitalism.
