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Evaluating Legality: Toward a Cultural Approach to the Study of Law and Social Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Idit Kostiner
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Abstract

The role of law in social change has been a subject of many academic debates. However, not much attention has been given to the contradictory ways in which activists for social change justify or criticize the use of law. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 25 social justice activists, I analyze the ways in which activists evaluate the role of law in social change. I find that activists invoke three distinct schemas of evaluation: instrumental, political, and cultural. The instrumental schema emphasizes change in the allocation of concrete resources; the political schema views change as the empowerment of marginalized communities; and the cultural schema emphasizes the transformation of assumptions that are shared by all members of society. Each schema provides activists with a particular order of justification that enables them to justify or to criticize the role of law in social change. While the multiplicity of schemas sustains the commonsense notion of law as a means for social change, it also accounts for possible changes in this notion.

Type
Of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , June 2003 , pp. 323 - 368
Copyright
© 2003 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the activists who gave generously of their time to participate in this study and shared their thoughts and experiences with me. I also wish to thank a number of people who read and commented on earlier drafts of this article, including Mark Antaki, Hadar Aviram, Amir Banbaji, Lauren Edelman, Yuval Feldman, Kaaryn Gustafson, Mark Harris, Susan Silbey, Shai Lavi, Kristin Luker, Laura Beth Nielsen, Joseph Sanders, Ronen Shamir, Ben Steiner, Ann Swidler, Omri Yadlin, and the anonymous reviewers from Law & Society Review. I presented earlier versions of this article at the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting 2002 and at the Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University, and I am grateful to the participants in these conferences for their useful suggestions. Thanks also to the Institute of Industrial Relations and to the Center for the Study of Law and Society, both at the University of California, Berkeley, for providing generous research grants that made this study possible.

References

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