Legal Mobilization within the Bureaucracy: Disability Rights and the Implementation of Antidiscrimination Law in Sweden

This article argues that the analysis of legal mobilization needs to give more attention to the state and its relationship with social movements in order to examine how the state either sustains social movements’ demands or is a field of contention for those demands. Focusing on how disability bureaucrats and activists mobilize antidiscrimination law in Sweden, this article shows that two main factors shape legal mobilization within the bureaucracy and alter the state's ability to become a legal mobilization actor: (1) the institutional relationships between social movement organizations and government agencies and (2) the profiles and careers of bureaucrats and activists. It concludes by suggesting several lines for further research on law and social movements in nonpluralist countries.     

Covering Legal Mobilization: A Bottom‐Up Analysis of Wards Cove v. Atonio

We develop a political history of Wards Cove v. Atonio (1989) to show how Robert Cover's concepts of jurisgenesis and jurispathy can enrich the legal mobilization framework for understanding law and social change. We illustrate the value of the hybrid theory by recovering the Wards Cove workers’ own understanding of the role of litigation in their struggle for workplace rights. The cannery worker plaintiffs exemplified Cover's dual logic by articulating aspirational narratives of social justice and by critically rebuking the Supreme Court's ruling as the “death throe” for progressive minority workers’ rights advocacy. The cannery workers’ story also highlights the importance of integrating legal mobilization scholars’ focus on extrajudicial political engagement into Cover's judge‐centered analysis. Our aim is to forge a theoretical bridge between Cover's provocative arguments about law and the analytical tradition of social science scholarship on the politics of legal mobilization.     

Bargaining in the Shadow of Social Institutions: Competing Discourses and Social Change in Workplace Mobilization of Civil Rights

The Family and Medical Leave Act requires employers to provide job-protected leave, but little is known about how these leave rights operate in practice or how they interact with other normative systems to construct the meaning of leave. Drawing on interviews with workers who negotiated contested leaves, this study examines how social institutions influence workplace mobilization of these rights. I find that leave rights remain embedded within institutionalized conceptions of work, gender, and disability that shape workers' perceptions, preferences, and choices about mobilizing their rights. I also find, however, that workers can draw on law as a culture discourse to challenge these assumptions, to build coalitions, and to renegotiate the meaning of leave.     

Shaping the Structure of Legal Opportunities: Environmental NGOs Bringing International Environmental Procedural Rights Back Home

Research on legal opportunity structures has focused on how existing law, standing rules, and the costs of litigation shape the likelihood that social movement groups will mobilize the law. Yet there has been relatively little research on how and why legal opportunity structures change over time. This article focuses on a case study of the mobilization of procedural environmental rights contained within the Aarhus Convention. It addresses the following empirical puzzle: how did rights that were designed to help Eastern Europeans achieve environmental democracy eventually contribute to a reshaping of the structure of legal opportunities in Britain? Through a two‐step historical process‐tracing analysis that relies on a social constructivist theoretical approach, this research shows that environmental groups mobilized Aarhus rights in a number of ways and across different judicial venues, resulting in an evolution over time of the meaning of access to justice so that it included being “not prohibitively expensive.” This research builds on previous work to show that civil society agents are not passive agents situated within legal opportunity structures but instead are strategic actors who can develop and shape access to justice through policy entrepreneurialism and litigation.     

Fear of the Disability Con: Perceptions of Fraud and Special Rights Discourse

This article presents a new framework for analyzing the development and implementation of disability law: the prism of the fear of “the disability con”—popular perceptions of fraud and fakery. We all encounter disability rights and accommodations in everyday life. However, people with disabilities pay a price for the legal recognition of their rights. People who park in disabled parking spots, use service dogs, move to the front of lines, receive Social Security benefits, or request academic accommodations are often viewed as faking disabilities and abusing the law. This disability con stereotype thus serves as an important invisible barrier preventing Americans with disabilities from fully taking part in society, as it not only undermines the public legitimacy of rights but also restricts the design and implementation of the legal regime illustrating those. Nevertheless, this moral panic around disability con in American society and its manifestations has yet to be studied in a systematic‐empirical way, nor has it been addressed in sociolegal scholarship. Using a mixed‐methods approach composed of an original nationally representative survey along with in‐depth interviews, this article fills this gap. The data suggest that the stereotype of disability con applies to multiple disability rights across venues and contexts; that nearly 60% of Americans with disabilities feel that others question their disability; that the stereotype of disability con extends to visible disabilities and to less apparent ones; and that, counterintuitively, the people most suspicious are nondisabled individuals with a personal connection to a disabled person and disabled people who experience suspicion themselves. Based on the richer understanding of the sociolegal phenomenon, this article suggests strategies to increase trust and reduce suspicion of the disability con.     

Legal Intermediaries: How Insurance Companies Construct the Meaning of Compliance with Antidiscrimination Laws

Existing empirical research suggests that human resource officials, managers, and in‐house counsel influence the meaning of antidiscrimination law by communicating an altered ideology of what civil rights laws mean that is colored with managerial values. This article explores how insurance companies play a critical and, as yet, unrecognized role in mediating the meaning of antidiscrimination law through Employment Practice Liability Insurance (EPLI). My analysis draws from, links, and contributes to two literatures that examine organizational behavior in different ways: new institutional organizational sociology studies of how organizations respond to legal regulation and sociolegal insurance scholars' research on how institutions govern through risk. Through participant observation at EPLI conferences, interviews, and content analysis of insurance loss prevention manuals, my study bridges these two literatures and highlights how the insurance field uses a risk‐based logic to construct the threat of employment law and influence the form of compliance from employers. Faced with uncertain legal risk concerning potential discrimination violations, insurance institutions elevate the risk and threat in the legal environment and offer EPLI and a series of risk‐management services that build discretion into legal rules and mediate the nature of civil rights compliance. My data suggest that insurance risk‐management services may sometimes be compatible with civil rights goals of improving equality, due process, and fair governance in workplace settings, but at other times may simply make discrimination claims against employers more defensible.     

Making Rights Work: Legal Mobilization at the Agency Level

This article discusses how McCann's theory on legal mobilization and social change is generalizable to the legal decisions of agencies. I demonstrate how the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) routinely delayed and denied Title VII employment rights on the basis of sex and how this resulted in the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) to ensure that the sex provision of Title VII was enforced. The article also discusses the influence of NOW in shaping the first years of Title VII law and the organization's role in reversing EEOC decisions denying rights under the sex provision of the law.     

论劳动者的罢工权

在法律上承认和规范劳动者的罢工权,防止非法罢工,不仅有利于劳动者劳动权益的维护,也有利于社会的稳定。罢工权不是孤立的,劳动法领域中的罢工权,是劳动者的一项劳动权利,是劳动者集体劳动权的重要组成部分,与劳动者组织工会的权利（团结权）、集体谈判的权利密不可分。劳动者享有法律所保护的合法罢工权。罢工基于维护劳动者的合法权益,局限于劳动关系领域,并要符合法律规定的程序。在法律上确立劳动者享有合法的罢工权后,如何保护依法罢工的劳动者的利益是法律必须面对和解决的重要问题,也是关系到劳动者罢工权是否能真正享有的保障。为了维护劳动者的权益,法律应当赋予劳动者罢工权,但当罢工影响到社会公共秩序的时候,罢工权就应该受到限制。     

Coping with Precariousness: How Social Insurance Law Shapes Workers' Survival Strategies in Vietnam

This article examines the role of social insurance law in the survival strategies of factory workers in Vietnam, especially when they are faced with pressing family needs and an uncertain future. Despite the official discourse of the law which encourages employees to accumulate social insurance for their pension benefits, workers in this study have considered their social insurance fund as a form of saving and opted to gain early access to it when they are in desperate need of money. Workers understand and use the law in a way that answers to their needs; however, such action simultaneously puts them outside the protection of the law. In workers' daily struggles, law generates a moral tension between rights and needs, and ultimately perpetuates their precarious, vulnerable condition. The article demonstrates how workers' legal consciousness varies according to their perception of their precariousness, a precariousness generated by the fragile nature of their work and underpinned by their traditional familial moral obligations. This research advances our understanding of the way state law in postsocialist regimes informs social action and consciousness in ways that oftentimes contradict the spirit of the law.     

Legal Capacity at a Crossroad: Mental Disability and Family Law

In this introductory essay to the Special Issue, I argue that both family law and disability rights law scholars should examine a key point of intersection across areas: legal capacity or the law's recognition of the rights and responsibilities of an individual. For example, parental termination proceedings center on parental fitness and functional capabilities. I contextualize the articles in the Special Issue by Leslie Francis and Robyn Powell on the role of reasonable accommodations for parents with disabilities in parental termination proceedings. In addition, I call upon legal scholars, family law courts, and practitioners to reimagine governing legal standards in family law according to principles of universal design to shift the baseline capabilities associated with parenting and parental fitness.     

Disability,Rights, and the Construction of Sexuality in Tort Claims

This study empirically investigates how courts define sexuality of disabled persons in the absence of a formal right to sexuality. The focus of the study is tort law, a field ungoverned by direct disability rights legislation, assuming that tort law is the law of disablement as it concerns the transformative process of becoming disabled. The study investigates the types of damages courts have awarded for harm to sexual functioning, inquiring to whom and under what conditions have they been awarded. Additionally, it examines the discourse that characterizes each type of damages, and the legal, social, medical, and healthcare policy developments that have affected courts' rhetoric and reasoning. Our findings reveal shifting trends in scale, content, and inclusiveness of beneficiaries in terms of gender and age. Over time, courts have adopted a more hopeful and dynamic approach to disabled persons' sexuality while remaining within an individual‐medical framework. We suggest that these shifting trends can be linked to the slow diffusion of the social‐affirmative approach to disability, the limits of tort law as a field, and the role of healthcare policy in shaping the landscape of tort claims.     

Parenting without Protection: How Legal Status Ambiguity Affects Lesbian and Gay Parenthood

Through the lens of lesbian and gay parenthood we ask how individuals who experience “legal status ambiguity”—that which emerges when legal fluctuations combine with divided attitudes, ignorance of the law, and autonomous institutional gatekeepers—exercise their legal rights and responsibilities. The results from thirty‐one interviews with lesbian and gay parents in Oregon and their six adult children suggest that the state's fluctuating legal and social climates for lesbian and gay parenting between 1985 and 2013 presented significant challenges for two generations of same‐sex parents. Although both cohorts created and utilized a range of legal and social mechanisms to assert their legal rights, they found these rights to be controlled as much by gatekeeper perspectives as by legal force. After the 2015 Obergefell ruling on marriage equality, lesbian and gay parenting status remains a site of ongoing legal and social contestation, providing insight into the risks and challenges of legal status ambiguity.     

论代工工厂模式的法律规制

近年来,我国代工工厂与日俱增,在促进就业和增加税收的同时,也引发了环境污染、工人自杀、工厂爆炸、工伤等一系列社会问题,备受公众和学界的关注,建议出台相关法律对代工工厂模式进行规制.事实上,解决这个问题的关键在于如何认定原始设计制造商与代工工厂及其劳动者的法律关系,它们既相互独立又存在一定管理和被管理关系.因此,应当以雇佣合同对代工工厂模式进行具体的法律规制,从而明确代工雇佣合同的内涵、特征、法律效力.当损害发生时,通过损害赔偿请求权来保障代工工厂、劳动者、第三人的合法权益,促进代工工厂在中国健康、和谐发展.     

Legal Change and Gender Inequality: Changes in Muslim Family Law in India

Group-specific family laws are said to provide women fewer rights and impede policy change. India's family law systems specific to religious groups underwent important gender-equalizing changes over the last generation. The changes in the laws of the religious minorities were unexpected, as conservative elites had considerable indirect influence over these laws. Policy elites changed minority law only if they found credible justification for change in group laws, group norms, and group initiatives, not only in constitutional rights and transnational human rights law. Muslim alimony and divorce laws were changed on this basis, giving women more rights without abandoning cultural accommodation. Legal mobilization and the outlook of policy makers—specifically their approach to regulating family life, their understanding of group norms, and their normative vision of family life—shaped the major changes in Indian Muslim law. More gender-equalizing legal changes are possible based on the same sources.     

Cause Lawyering and Movement Tactics: Disability Rights Movements in South Korea and Japan

We investigate cause lawyers’ roles in movements for the domestic adoption of international human rights norms. Social movements scholarship often assumes that lawyers will divert activism toward institutional tactics, while the sociolegal studies literature emphasizes that lawyers are active in diverse ways across venues. A paired comparison of antidiscrimination movements in South Korea and Japan reveals how critical junctures in regime history shape the tactical repertoires that cause lawyers bring to their interactions with movement actors, and thus also movement tactics. This research advances scholarship on professionals in social movements, cause lawyers as norm entrepreneurs, and legal mobilization in East Asia.     

关于我国残疾人福利法律制度构建之思考

构建残疾人福利法律制度是残疾人权益保障事业的重要一环,目前我国残疾人福利保障的立法体系仍未建立,现有相关法律制度对各类残疾人福利的保障有欠平等,国家责任原则未得到充分体现。今后,应科学构建残疾人福利法律制度体系,明确保障残疾人福利权理念和维护残疾人的尊严之理念,贯彻残疾人福利保障的国家责任原则。     

个人数据安全的法律保护模式——从数据确权的视角切入

个人数据权益的多元性,决定了个人数据在不同场景中的权属不同,这意味着对不同权属性质的个人数据,提供的法律保护模式也不同。我国对个人数据的法律保护模式有三种:财产权保护模式、人格权保护模式和平台保护模式。鉴于当前我国数据确权的制度安排尚未完成、数据的人格权保护没有得到公益救济、数据利益的损害赔偿无法实现,有必要对不同权属性质的个人数据作出有针对性的调整方案:在方法论上应突破私法或公法的思维局限,在立法论与数据应用实践层面,对现有的个人数据保护模式作出相应的调整,通过商业秘密保护模式拓宽数据财产权的保护路径,利用个人数据场景化保护模式弥补人格权保护模式的虚置,利用平台保护模式优化数据安全法律保护的制度设计。     

Dead ringers? Legal persons and the deceased in European data protection law

Notwithstanding suggestions that the concrete treatment of legal and deceased person data during European data protection's development has been broadly comparable, this article finds that stark divergences are in fact apparent. Justification for the inclusion of both categories has rested on a claimed linkage to living natural person interests. However, despite early fusion, legal persons have been increasingly seen to have qualitatively different information entitlements compared to natural persons, thereby leaving European data protection with a very limited and indirect role here. In contrast, living natural persons and the deceased have not been conceived as normatively dichotomous and since the 1990s there has been growing interest both in establishing sui generis direct protection for deceased person data and also indirect inclusion through a link with living natural persons. Whilst the case for some indirect inclusion is overwhelming, a broad approach to the inter-relational nature of data risks further destabilizing the personal data concept even in relation to living persons alone. Given that jurisdictions representing almost half of the EEA's population now provide some direct protection and the challenges of managing digital data on death continue to grow, the time may be ripe for a ‘soft’ recommendation on direct protection in this area. Drawing on existing law and scholarship, such a recommendation could seek to specify the role of both specific control rights and diffuse confidentiality obligations, the criteria for time-limits in each case and the need for a balance with other rights and interests which recognises the significantly decreasing interest in protection over time.