Doctoral Dissertation Research: Rights Mobilization in Comparative Perspective

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Under what conditions does collective legal mobilization occur and how do litigation strategies vary? Efforts to answer these questions focus mainly on positive mobilization, cases in which constitutional litigation is used. The proposed study, by contrast, offers a framework for examining sites "ripe" for constitutional action but where it did not occur. Conducting a comparative study of litigation and rights mobilization, this research examines how three factors impact legal strategies: the citizenship environment, resource landscape, and past history of mobilization. The project will train a graduate student in rigorous and empirically-grounded qualitative methods, and the findings will contribute to policy debates in the United States and abroad around issues of rights mobilization and constitutionalism. The project examines the conditions for collective legal mobilization by focusing on a particular group of non-citizens: temporary foreign workers (TFW). Legal mobilization by documented TFWs, also called guest workers, is rare, though guest workers have pursued constitutional challenges in Hong Kong and Israel, but not in countries like Canada and the United States with a longer history of fostering impact litigation strategies to claim rights. What compelled guest workers in Hong Kong to bring a legal challenge? How and why do guest workers in Canada and the US differ in their legal strategies? Drawing on citizenship and immigration studies, law and social change theory, and social movement scholarship, the project compares three national contexts, Canada, United States, and Hong Kong, using two pairwise comparisons, domestic workers in Toronto and Hong Kong and agricultural workers in the US and Canada. The research takes a qualitative case-study approach, analyzing court decisions, laws, and policies, and conducting in-depth interviews of advocacy organizations, activist lawyers, and TFWs.