Collaborative Research: The Efficacy of Support Structures for Legal Mobilization

University Of Denver, Denver CO

Investigators

Abstract

Sociolegal scholarship has shown how law schools and training programs can serve as support structures that provide critical intellectual, social, and material resources for movements seeking to influence the law. While this scholarship establishes that these institutions are a necessary precondition for change, it leaves open an important question. Namely, are there types of support structures that are more or less effective at producing and facilitating the transfer of these valuable resources to and within movements? Contemporary legal movements provide a unique opportunity to address this question, as their patrons have, since the late-1990s, invested in support institutions representative of three different types - Leveraging, Supplemental, and Parallel Alternative Structures. This study uses this variation to help forward two models for understanding and assessing the efficacy of different support structure strategies. It does this by collecting and aggregating institutional data from three law schools and one legal training program at the heart of these contemporary legal movements. PIs will supplement these data with evidence gathered from personal interviews, participant observation, and an original survey. PIs will analyze these data both qualitatively and quantitatively, with the primary methods involving interpretive data analysis and network mapping. This project will provide important insights for scholars and practitioners and will have at least two significant impacts. First, through the development of new models for understanding movements, this project will make a theoretical contribution to the scholarly literature on support structures, legal mobilization, and social movements. Secondly, policy activists who have learned that a support structure is necessary for legal change have little guidance from the literature as to what kinds of support structures will best facilitate the transfer of resources between their movement and policy demanders. This project will help inform this important policy and scholarly conversation.